The Challenge of Bible Translation

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CHALLENGE of bible translation

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U n d e r s t a n d i n g t h e T h e o r y, H i s t o r y, and Practice

the

CHALLENGE of bible translation communicating god’s word to the world glen g. scorgie, mark l. strauss, steven m. voth general editors

Essays in Honor of Ronald F. Youngblood

ZONDERVAN The Challenge of Bible Translation Copyright © 2003 by Glen G. Scorgie, Mark L. Strauss, and Steven M. Voth

All rights reserved under International and Pan -American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non -exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e -book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down -loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, withou t the express written permission of Zondervan. AER Edition January 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-32186-6 Requests for information should be addressed to: Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The challenge of Bible translation : communicating God’s word to the world / Glen G. Scorgie, Mark L. Strauss, and Steven M. Voth, general editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 0-310-24685-7 ISBN-13: 0-310-24685-5 1. Bible—Translating. I. Scorgie, Glen G. II. Strauss, Mark L. III. Voth, Steven M. BS449 .C43 2003 220.5—dc21 2003000027

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Contents Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Dedicatory Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 Glen G. Scorgie, Mark L. Strauss, and Steven M. Voth Introduction and Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 Glen G. Scorgie

PART 1: T HE T HEORY

OF

B IBLE T RANSL ATION

1. Are Translators Traitors? Some Personal Reflections Moisés Silva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37 2. Bible Translation Philosophies with Special Reference to the New International Version Kenneth L. Barker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51 3. The Limits of Functional Equivalence in Bible Translation— and Other Limits, Too D. A. Carson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65 4. Current Issues in the Gender-Language Debate: A Response to Vern Poythress and Wayne Grudem Mark L. Strauss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115 5. Translation as a Communal Task Herbert M. Wolf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .143 6. English Bible Translation in Postmodern Perspective: Reflections on a Critical Theory of Holistic Translation Charles H. Cosgrove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .159

PART 2: T HE H ISTORY

OF

B IBLE T RANSL ATION

7. The Bible in English: An Overview Dick France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177

8. A Translator’s Perspective on Alister McGrath’s History of the King James Version Walter W. Wessel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .199 9. Translation Was Not Enough: The Ecumenical and Educational Efforts of James “Diego” Thomson and the British and Foreign Bible Society Kent A. Eaton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .213 10. The New International Version: How It Came to Be John H. Stek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .235 11. That Fabulous Talking Snake Ronald A. Veenker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .265 12. Slip of the Eye: Accidental Omission in the Masoretic Tradition David Noel Freedman and David Miano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .273

PART 3: T HE P RACTICE

OF

B IBLE T RANSL ATION

13. Agur’s Apologia for Verbal, Plenary Inspiration: An Exegesis of Proverbs 30:1–6 Bruce K. Waltke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .303 14. Justice and/or Righteousness: A Contextualized Analysis of S>edeq in the KJV (English) and RVR (Spanish) Steven M. Voth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .321 15. Translating John’s Gospel: Challenges and Opportunities Andreas J. Köstenberger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .347 16. “Flesh” in Romans: A Challenge for the Translator Douglas J. Moo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .365 17. Faith as Substance or Surety: Historical Perspectives on Hypostasis in Hebrews 11:1 James D. Smith III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .381 18. The Use of Capital Letters in Translating Scripture into English Larry Lee Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .393 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .423 About the Publisher. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .431 Share Your Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .432

C o n t r i b u t or s Kenneth L. Barker (Ph.D., Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning), Executive Director, NIV Translation Center, International Bible Society (Retired) D. A. Carson (Ph.D., Cambridge University), Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Charles H. Cosgrove (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary), Professor of New Testament Studies and Christian Ethics, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary Kent A. Eaton (Ph.D., University of Wales, Lampeter), Associate Professor of Pastoral Ministries and Associate Dean, Bethel Seminary San Diego Dick France (Ph.D., University of Bristol), formerly Principal, Wycliffe Hall, Oxford (Retired) David Noel Freedman (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University), Professor of History, Endowed Chair of Hebrew Biblical Studies, University of California, San Diego Andreas J. Köstenberger (Ph.D., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), Professor of New Testament and Greek and Director of Ph.D. and Th.M. Studies, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary David Miano (B.A., State University of New York at Buffalo), Ph.D. Candidate and Associate Instructor, University of California, San Diego Douglas J. Moo (Ph.D., University of St. Andrews), Blanchard Professor of New Testament, Wheaton College Graduate School Glen G. Scorgie (Ph.D., University of St. Andrews), Professor of Theology, Bethel Seminary San Diego 7

Moisés Silva (Ph.D., University of Manchester), formerly Professor of New Testament, Westminster Theological Seminary and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary James D. Smith III (Th.D., Harvard University), Associate Professor of Church History, Bethel Seminary San Diego, Lecturer at the University of San Diego, and Associate Pastor, College Avenue Baptist Church John H. Stek (Drs., Free University, Amsterdam), Emeritus Professor of Old Testament, Calvin Theological Seminary Mark L. Strauss (Ph.D., Aberdeen University), Associate Professor of New Testament, Bethel Seminary San Diego Ronald A. Veenker (Ph.D., Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion), Professor of Religious Studies, Western Kentucky University Steven M. Voth (Ph.D., Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion), Translation Consultant, United Bible Societies Larry Lee Walker (Ph.D., Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning), formerly Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament, Beeson Divinity School (Retired) Bruce K. Waltke (Ph.D., Harvard University), Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies, Regent College, and Professor of Old Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando Walter W. Wessel (Ph.D., Edinburgh University), Emeritus Professor of New Testament, Bethel Seminary San Diego (Deceased) Herbert M. Wolf (Ph.D., Brandeis University), Professor of Old Testament, Wheaton College and Graduate School (Deceased)

A b b r e v i at i o n s

BIBLE VERSIONS AMP

Amplified Bible

ASV

American Standard Version

BER

New Berkeley Version (also MLB)

BOL

Book of Life: A Messianic Jewish Version

CEV

Contemporary English Version

ESV

English Standard Version

GNB

Good News Bible (also TEV)

GNC

God’s New Covenant

GW HCSB ISV JB

God’s Word Holman Christian Standard Bible International Standard Version Jerusalem Bible

JNT

Jewish New Testament (Stern)

KJV

King James Version

JPS

The Holy Scriptures: Jewish Publication Society

LB

Living Bible

MLB

Modern Language Bible (also BER)

NAB

New American Bible

NASB

New American Standard Bible

NCV

New Century Version

NEB

New English Bible

NET

New English Translation

NJB

New Jerusalem Bible -9-

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The Challenge of Bible Translation NIV

New International Version

NIVI

NIV Inclusive Language Edition (Britain)

NIrV

New International Reader’s Version

NKJV NL NLT NRSV NVI PHILLIPS

New King James Version New Life Version New Living Translation New Revised Standard Version Nueva Versión Internacional The New Testament in Modern English, J. B. Phillips

REB

Revised English Bible

RSV

Revised Standard Version

RV

Revised Version

RVR

Reina Valera Revisada

TEV

Today’s English Version (also GNB)

TNIV

Today’s New International Version

TNK

Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Jewish Publication Society)

OTHER ABBREVIATIONS AGJU

Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums

AThR BAG(D)

Anglican Theological Review Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich (2d ed.: and Danker). Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature

BDAG

Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich (3d ed.). Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature

BDB

Brown, Driver, and Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament

BDF

Blass, Debrunner, and Funk. A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature

BECNT

Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament

BETL

Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium

Abbreviations BFBS BHS Bib BIOSCS

11 British and Foreign Bible Society Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia Biblica Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies

BKAT

Biblischer Kommentar, Altes Testament

BZAW

Beihefte zur ZAW

BZNW

Beihefte zur ZNW

CBMW

Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

CBT

The Committee on Bible Translation (for the NIV)

CBQ

Catholic Biblical Quarterly

CRC

Christian Reformed Church

CT

Christianity Today

EBC

Expositor’s Bible Commentary

ETS

Evangelical Theological Society

ExpTim FBA HALOT

Expository Times Forum of Bible Agencies Koehler, Baumgartner, and Stamm. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament

HAT HNTC IBHS

Handbuch zum Alten Testament Harper’s New Testament Commentaries Waltke and O’Connor. An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

ICC

International Critical Commentary

IJAL

International Journal of American Linguistics

IVP

InterVarsity Press

JBC

Journal of Biblical Counseling

JBL

Journal of Biblical Literature

JETS JTS JSNT JSNTSup JSOT

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Journal of Theological Studies Journal for the Study of the New Testament JSNT Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

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The Challenge of Bible Translation

JSOTSup

JSOT Supplement Series

LCL

Loeb Classical Library

LXX

Septuagint

NAE

National Association of Evangelicals

NIB NICNT NIDOTTE Notes NovTSup NPNF NT NTS NYBS NYBSI OT PNTC

The New Interpreter’s Bible New International Commentary on the New Testament New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis Notes on Translation Novum Testamentum Supplements Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers New Testament New Testament Studies New York Bible Society New York Bible Society International Old Testament Pillar New Testament Commentary

SIL

Summer Institute of Linguistics

SNT

Studien zum Neuen Testament

SNTG

Studies in New Testament Greek

SNTSMS

Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series

TDNT

Kittel and Friedrich. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament

TDOT

Botterweck and Ringgren. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament

TLOT

Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament

TWOT

Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament

TynBul

TyndaleBulletin

UBS VT

United Bible Societies Vetus Testamentum

VTSup

Vetus Testamentum Supplements

WUNT

Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament

ZAW ZIBBC ZNW

Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älterern Kirche

Abbreviations

13

ca.

circa (around, about, approximately)

cf.

confer, compare

ch(s). diss. ed(s).

chapter(s) dissertation editor(s), edited by

e.g.

for example

esp.

especially

et al.

and others

etc.

and the rest

f(f).

and the following one(s)

ibid.

in the same place

idem

the same

i.e.

that is

lit.

literally

p(p).

page(s)

passim s.v. trans. v(v). rpt. x

here and there under the word translator, translated by verse(s) reprinted number of times a form occurs

OLD TESTAMENT BOOKS NEW TESTAMENT BOOKS Gen

Genesis

Matt

Exod

Exodus

Mark

Mark

Lev

Leviticus

Luke

Luke

Num

Numbers

John

John

Deut

Deuteronomy

Acts

Acts

Josh

Joshua

Rom

Romans

Judg

Judges

1–2 Cor

Ruth

Ruth

Gal

Galatians

1–2 Samuel

Eph

Ephesians

1–2 Sam

Matthew

1–2 Corinthians

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The Challenge of Bible Translation

OLD TESTAMENT BOOKS NEW TESTAMENT BOOKS 1–2 Kgs

1–2 Kings

Phil

Philippians

1–2 Chr

1–2 Chronicles

Col

Colossians

Ezra

Ezra

Neh

Nehemiah

Esth

Esther

Titus

Titus

Job

Phlm

Philemon

Heb

Hebrews

Job Ps/Pss

Psalms

Prov

Proverbs

Eccl

Ecclesiastes

Song

Song of Songs

1–2 Thess 1–2 Tim

Jas 1–2 Pet 1–2–3 John

1–2 Thessalonians 1–2 Timothy

James 1–2 Peter 1–2–3 John

Isa

Isaiah

Jude

Jude

Jer

Jeremiah

Rev

Revelation

Lam

Lamentations

Ezek

Ezekiel

Dan

Daniel

Hos

Hosea

Joel

Joel

Amos

Amos

Obad

Obadiah

Jonah

Jonah

Mic

Micah

Nah

Nahum

Hab

Habakkuk

Zeph

Zephaniah

Hag

Haggai

Zech

Zechariah

Mal

Malachi

D e d i c at o r y P r e f a c e “Great men seem to us men of great boldness; in reality they are more obedient than others.” —A. G. SERTILLANGES, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE

T

his volume of essays on the challenge of Bible translation is presented in honor of Ronald F. Youngblood, a leading evangelical voice and an outstanding teacher, scholar, editor, and Bible translator. It is a modest work to honor a great person whose entire direction in life—and significant achievements along the way—has been the natural product of his lifelong obedience to the higher purposes of his Lord. Ron was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1931, nurtured in modest circumstances, and drawn to faith in Jesus Christ at a young age. During his teen years he moved with his family to the small town of Chesterton, Indiana. In due course he attended nearby Valparaiso University and upon graduation in 1952 married Carolyn Johnson, with whom he has enjoyed the blessing of a half century of mutually supportive partnership. After Valparaiso the Youngbloods traveled to the West Coast, where Ron enrolled in the Bachelor of Divinity program at Fuller Seminary (1952–55) and was formatively influenced by E. J. Carnell, William Sanford La Sor, and David Hubbard. Ron’s emerging aptitude and passion for Old Testament research led the Youngbloods back across America to the Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Ron earned his Ph.D. in 1961. Always learning, he subsequently invested an academic year (1967–68) on an archaeological fellowship at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. Over the years he has become a savvy traveler and explorer of ancient things in the Middle East. At the same time Ron has always been committed to the welfare of the church. This was signaled early on through his ordination to the gospel ministry in 1958 at Oxford Circle Baptist Church in Philadelphia. His direct contributions to congregational life since then have included regular pulpit ministry, lay 15

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The Challenge of Bible Translation

teaching, and periodic interim pastorates. One literary legacy of this dimension of his vocation is a collection of his sermons titled Special-Day Sermons: Outlines and Messages (1973, 1978, 1989). Ronald Youngblood has been closely and continuously associated with Bethel Seminary for his entire academic career of over forty years. In 1961 he was hired to teach Old Testament at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and did so with distinction until 1978. Even while subsequently serving for much briefer periods at Wheaton College Graduate School (1978–81) and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (1981–82), he maintained his Bethel association on an annual basis as an adjunct professor. In 1982 he accepted the Old Testament professorship at Bethel Seminary West, Bethel’s new campus in San Diego, California. Ron’s presence added, and continues to add, considerable credibility to this school (now known as Bethel Seminary San Diego), and Southern California has been home for the Youngbloods ever since. It serves as his base for consultations, lectureships, and short-term teaching ministries literally around the world. Unquestionably, Ron Youngblood has been gifted with a brilliant mind. He has an encyclopedic memory, an enviable aptitude for languages, and an astonishing editorial efficiency and accuracy. Yet for all of that, he has never been one of those stereotypical ivory-tower scholars who thinks (in the words of Adolf Harnack) that he has discharged his duties by treating the gospel “in the recondite language of learning and burying it in scholarly folios.”1 He has always loved the church and respected the laity too much to treat the gospel in such a manner. He represents the democratic instinct of the evangelical tradition at its very best. It is no accident that C. S. Lewis and Billy Graham are among those he most admires. Ron has made a very significant contribution to biblical scholarship through his many Old Testament publications. There is no scandal to his evangelical mind. Space limitations require that only a few of his scholarly publications be highlighted here. His first book, Great Themes of the Old Testament (1968), has enjoyed perennial appeal and is still in print under a new title The Heart of the Old Testament (2d ed., 1998). Two of his smaller books, Faith of Our Fathers (1976) and How It All Began (1980), were blended into The Book of Genesis: An Introductory Commentary (2d ed., 1999). In this work he demonstrated a judicious “conservationist” perspective while taking full account of the historical origins and literary genre of Genesis. His research on biblical beginnings also qualified him to edit a related work, The Genesis Debate: Persistent Questions about Creation and the Flood (1986), in which two opposing views were fairly presented.

Dedicatory Preface

17

The breadth of Ron’s Old Testament scholarship is reflected in additional publications on Exodus (1983, 1999), Themes from Isaiah (1983), and especially in his extensive work on First and Second Samuel for volume 3 of the Expositor’s Bible Commentary (1992), work that was later adapted for inclusion in the twovolume Zondervan NIV Bible Commentary (1994). Ron has also been an outstanding editor over the years. He served for a remarkably long run of twenty-two crucial years (1976–98) as the editor of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (JETS). In this capacity he helped to fortify the scholarly reputation of the Evangelical Theological Society and contributed to the intellectual credibility of the evangelical tradition generally. He has always been an irenic advocate of a high view of Scripture, and during his tenure as JETS editor he selected and published a collection of JETS articles known as Evangelicals and Inerrancy (1984). Certainly no less significant were his labors as an associate editor for the NIV Study Bible (1985)—work that continues to this day (he was associate editor for a revised edition published in October 2002)—and as general editor of Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1995). In 1996 this latter volume won the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Gold Medallion Award for reference books. It is for Ron as a person that those of us privileged to know him feel the most affection. His exceptional sense of humor has often brought relief to stultifying committee meetings, diffused tension at other times, and always reminded us that it is unwise to take ourselves too seriously. And there are some paradoxical features of his temperament that endear him to us as well. He oscillates, for example, between statesmanship on significant matters to occasional goofiness over lunch at the local Burger King. He can be a creature of rather parochial lunchtime habits while at home but then immediately get on an airplane for another of his adventures to the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. A largehearted and generous man, his frugality is legendary. His accomplishments have been considerable, to say the least, yet he remains a genuinely humble person who encourages younger colleagues and students and rejoices in the accomplishments of others. His heart truly is set on the bigger picture of kingdom advance and the interests of his Savior. And by drawing on the resources of his faith in Jesus Christ, Ron has developed an unusual joy in living and a buoyancy of spirit that are contagious to everyone around him. This joy has remained resilient, even in the midst of anxieties and experiences of loss. Nothing has been closer to Ron’s heart over the years than the challenge of finding ways to faithfully communicate the Bible’s meaning through the symbols and words of diverse and changing cultures. This significant dimension of

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The Challenge of Bible Translation

Ron’s vocation began in 1970. Arthur Lewis, his Old Testament colleague at Bethel College, was working on a translation team reporting to the newly organized Committee on Bible Translation (CBT), and Dr. Lewis arranged for Ron to join the team. Ron’s administrative efficiency and exceptional gifts for editing and translating became progressively evident, and in 1976 he was invited to join the CBT (initially as a “nonmember” member) during its pressured run to meet a 1978 deadline for publication of the complete New International Version. He has been an integral part of the CBT ever since and played an active editortranslator role in the development of the first revised edition of the NIV (1984). He also served as executive editor of the New International Reader’s Version: New Testament (1995, 1998), a Bible designed for youthful readers and adult readers with more limited vocabularies (e.g., those for whom English is a second language). More recently he played a significant role in the development of the Today’s New International Version (TNIV), a version designed to reflect more recent developments in English-language meanings. The TNIV New Testament was published in 2002; the Old Testament portion is projected to release in 2004. Ron continues as an active member of the International Bible Society’s Committee on Bible Translation. He seems most alive when he is hunkered down with his closest friends and colleagues in the painstaking collaborative work of Bible translation. In addition to this significant hands-on work, he chairs the board of directors of the International Bible Society, the official sponsor of the NIV and an organization with a vision for Bible translation and distribution that extends well beyond the English-speaking world. Ron’s great passion for the task of correctly handling the word of truth (2 Tim 2:15) will be part of his legacy to the next generation of evangelical scholars and colleagues. He has enriched our lives by his mentoring and friendship and by his faithfulness to Scripture and to the vocation of a Christian scholar. It has been a special honor, inspiration, and delight for all of us to have been associated with him over the years. —GLEN G. SCORGIE, MARK L. STRAUSS, AND STEVEN M. VOTH

NOTES 1. Adolf von Harnack, Preface to What is Christianity? trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), vi.

Intr oduction and Overvie w Glen G. Scorgie

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO UKARUMPA The twin-engine Cessna descended through a break in the clouds and circled a hillside community before landing on a dirt airstrip nearby. We had arrived in the mile-high town of Ukarumpa in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Encircled by protective fencing, the town is home to over a thousand international residents and their local assistants. Their modest but well-maintained houses cover the slopes. Near the end of the day conservatively dressed people can be seen striding along the roads, shoulders hunched in earnestness as they lug laptops and tote bags of important paperwork home for the evening. An air of quiet diligence pervades the scene. All around is coffee-growing country, but the town of Ukarumpa exists for a different purpose. Founded in the 1950s, owned and operated by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL—also known as Wycliffe Bible Translators), an evangelical parachurch organization, it is probably the world’s largest installation for the purpose of linguistic research and Bible translation. The linguistic techniques, computer software, and technical support employed here are state-ofthe-art. Fact-gathering visits to tribal situations are kept brief and to a minimum out of respect for fragile indigenous cultures. An impressive number of translation projects have already been completed, and personnel here are working in no less than 175 different languages. Ukarumpa may be exceptional, but it is not an oddity. Rather, it is a notable example of a much larger enterprise going on for many years just below the radar screen of public awareness. This work is really as old as the Greek Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible prepared in the Egyptian city of Alexandria prior to the birth of Jesus Christ. It is as venerable as the New Testament itself, in which, 19

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The Challenge of Bible Translation

as former missionary Andrew Walls puts it, “the very words of Jesus come to us in Greek dress.”1 It is as ancient as Jerome’s fourth-century Latin Vulgate version that monopolized the mind of the Western church for over a millennium. But the challenge of Bible translation as we know it today is fueled to a considerable extent by evangelical Protestant passion to get the transforming Word of God out into the hands and hearts of the people of the world. The evangelical tradition is nothing if it is not Bible-centered,2 so it continues to resonate with the sentiments of Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, who said, “I should prefer all my books to perish that only the Bible might be read, for other books take up our attention and make us neglect [it].”3 And evangelicals exude an almost boundless confidence in the spiritual power of these same Scriptures, a confidence memorably expressed by Charles Spurgeon when he said, “The word of God is like a lion. You don’t have to defend a lion. All you have to do is let the lion loose, and the lion will defend itself.” The evangelical view leads first, then, to the conviction that Bible translation is a vitally important endeavor. But what exactly is the challenge of Bible translation all about? As with translation endeavors generally, the goal of Bible translation is to transfer the meaning of a biblical text from its source language to some other receptor language so that communication occurs. Everything else about the translation business—all the linguistic expertise and scholarly apparatus, the lexicons, and the software—is little more than scaffolding. The key point is that communication is not just a matter of proclaiming something. It requires that the message sent out be received—and not only received but received in such a way that the reader (or viewer or listener) actually “gets it.” In Bible translation, faithfulness to the original meaning of a text is important, but it is not enough. The other critical test is what it enables its readers to understand. Translation is all about communication, and communication is by its very nature dialogical. It cares about its source and it cares about its audience. It is about what actually transfers from a point of origin to a destination. Every undergraduate is familiar with Bishop George Berkeley’s philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?” In a similar vein we might well ask, “If a translation is published but fails to communicate, is it really a translation?” Particularly in these days of fuzzy thinking and epistemological malaise, it is important to affirm something else about Bible translation: Not only is it highly desirable; it is also possible. It is thoroughly Christian to hold that the divinely inspired Word first communicated through Hebrew and Greek language (and the ways of viewing life that those languages reflected) can now be meaningfully

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conveyed through other human languages as well. It is a great grace—and one to be celebrated by Christians—that divinely revealed truth is portable between linguistic systems and equally potent in its new dress. Meaningful communication need not be confined within the locus of any linguistic system, including the loci of the original biblical languages. The Christian faith carries within itself the grounds for affirming the possibility of interlinguistic transfer and successful Bible translation. It does so through its heuristic paradigms of Pentecost and the Incarnation. Certainly this is at least part of what was symbolically proclaimed at Pentecost when an international audience in Jerusalem reported that every one of them was able to hear and understand the apostolic gospel in his or her own tongue (Acts 2:11). It was Luke’s way of affirming that Babel was not to be God’s final and fateful verdict on the human race. And Christian hopefulness about Bible translation does not depend on this alone. It is grounded as well in the Incarnation itself. The paradigm of the Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh, is foundational to the translator’s task. Andrew Walls again puts it so well: “There is a history of translation of the Bible because there was a translation of the Word into flesh.”4 Bible translators must be modest, but they also ought to be—if they are Christians—optimistic as well. Meaning can never be transferred between linguistic systems comprehensively (thus the modesty), but it can be transferred truly and substantially (thus the hopefulness). Historic Christianity affirms with the apostle Paul that “in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Col 2:9, emphasis added). Christ’s divinity was not lost or diminished through his assumption of our humanity. Christian translators rightly draw inspiration from the triumphs of Pentecost and the Incarnation. The Incarnation is a Christian’s ground for affirming that translation is possible. It may also be treated as a pointer to how translation ought to be conducted. The God who previously communicated in a variety of ways eventually chose, as his ultimate communication initiative, to become fully incarnate as a human being (Heb 1:1–2). God’s truth was communicated with unprecedented clarity and depth as God fully embraced our humanity. The application of this principle to translation leads us to conclude that the more thoroughly the Bible is translated into the language and thought-constructs of a receptor group, the more powerfully and effectively its divine message can be expected to shine through. Just as the early church celebrated a Savior who was fully God and fully human, without compromise of either nature, we should expect by analogy that the most powerful translations for communicating divine truth will be the ones that are most thoroughly contextual (or “human”) in form. Unlike ancient Docetism, incarnational Christianity enters fully and without fear into the world as it is.

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The Challenge of Bible Translation

Bible translation is both important and possible—yet it is also far from simple. Quite a few contributors to this volume refer to a famous Italian aphorism about all translators being “traitors.” Traitor is a strong word, and these contributors deliberately use it to puncture naïveté about the business of translation. They use it as a way of humbly acknowledging that some things will become hidden through translation and that, realistically, good translation is more about minimizing such losses than escaping them altogether. Today the complexity of the translation challenge is becoming more deeply appreciated. As a result the Christian public is undergoing a somewhat painful adjustment in thinking as it comes to understand that no two human languages ever match up exactly word for word in a convenient parallel-column sort of way. Translation is not as straightforward as converting Fahrenheit temperatures to Celsius or Roman numerals to regular numbers. Thus, one of the recurring themes in this volume is that translation is not an exact science. We should take this to mean that the fantasy of a one-for-one mechanical conversion process has finally been exposed for the falsehood it really is. Consequently, we should begin to think of translation method as different from the more rigid methodologies of the hard sciences and as demanding a wider breadth of competencies and sensitivities on the part of the translator. It is, after all is said and done, an art. Yet, for all of this there is still a rigor and a discipline to translation that is actually more demanding than the older model anticipated. As a result the challenge might better be described as a disciplined art of Bible translation. In certain cases Christians who hold to a high view of Scripture find it difficult to adjust to this reality. By way of explanation, some of their more uncharitable opponents speculate that such persons are Fundamentalists, and as such are allergic to complexity and gravitate out of fear toward simplistic resolutions of issues. But the problem with this dismissive view is that not everyone who highly esteems Scripture and who struggles to embrace established principles of Bible translation is a Fundamentalist by viewpoint or temperament. There must be something else going on as well. Others propose that the problem lies in a linguistic naïveté widespread among conservative Christians, a naïveté that can be corrected through better information and education. This may well be the case in some instances, and the dissemination of accurate information can only help. But perhaps conservative objections will prove resistant to such efforts, because they are actually rooted in something else, namely, some common conservative assumptions about biblical inspiration and inerrancy. According to the historic evangelical view, divine inspiration is more than a general influence over the biblical authors as a whole; inspiration extends to the micro-level of the very

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words found in the original text. This is an important doctrine for evangelicals, and it needs to be maintained. But at this point the reasoning of some (not all) conservative evangelicals begins to shift from defensible doctrine to questionable inference. Each individual word of Scripture, the questionable reasoning suggests, was specifically selected by God and delivered to us from above in a manner very similar to dictation. The words were sent down, one at a time, like crystal droplets. Each word is an autonomous integer, separate from the rest, and each is to be treasured like a sacred gem and cherished inviolate for all time. When it comes to translation preference and practice, the implications of this way of thinking are predicable. Those who view Scripture this way (and not all evangelicals do, of course) favor attempts at word-for-word translation. Translations produced in this fashion are naively thought to retain all the precious original words, except that they are just in a different code now. The inclination is to assume that in every language there is a template of more or less exact equivalents to the inspired Hebrew and Greek words with which we started out. This is, of course, not the case at all. If evangelicals are to get beyond their current impasse over translation theory, they will need a more profound doctrine of biblical inerrancy—one that continues to respect the inspired words of the original text but also acknowledges that these words are mere instruments in the service of a higher purpose, namely, the communication of meaning. Today there is a growing awareness of the strategic role that (usually anonymous) translators play. Most Christians do not understand the original languages, and therefore do not personally have access to the text of the Bible as it was originally written. For the most part they are dependent on translators to tell them what the Bible says. Translators are thus the first-line gatekeepers for the Word of God. Just as stock market investors need to be able to trust corporate executives and their auditors, the church must be able to trust its translators. When translators are, fairly or unfairly, suspected or accused of ulterior motives or deliberate distortion, there is a crisis of confidence. The current debates in the church over translational integrity requires that thoughtful clergy and laity gain information about what is going on in this field so they can determine for themselves where their confidence should be properly placed. The literature on translation (and Bible translation in particular) is substantial, but it is for the most part written for specialists and practitioners. Popular literature on the topic is still not extensive. This volume is a modest contribution toward a more accessible body of work on this important topic. Admittedly, this book provides only a narrow window on the broad enterprise of Bible translation. While there are some references to translation in

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Spanish and other languages—and certainly many of the principles articulated have wider application—the book focuses on English Bible translation. It is a familiar criticism that the disproportionately large and ever-increasing number of English Bible translations reflects both an intolerable inequity and patent Anglophone self-indulgence. While there may be, in certain restricted instances, a measure of truth to this criticism, the other reality is that the English language continues to change, probably more rapidly than some others, and English Bible translation must keep pace with these developments. Beyond this, there is also the fact that the potential usefulness of an English translation today far exceeds that of most other language translations—and probably equals the potential reach of many hundreds of smaller language translations put together. So both sides of this issue have to be weighed fairly. The spread of the English language around the world is truly phenomenal, and it just so happens that today Bibles in English have an almost unmatched potential to communicate globally. The contributors to this volume, though not in lockstep, are generally united in their support of the translation theory of functional equivalence in its basic contours. The reader will soon discover that the influence of Eugene Nida has been significant for many of the contributors. Nida’s views on translation, as found in such publications as Toward a Science of Translating (1964), The Theory and Practice of Translation (1974), and From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating (1986), provide the theoretical foundation for their ongoing enterprise. And, as Dick France points out in this volume, the influence of Nida is, if anything, even more profound among contemporary translators (like those in Ukarumpa) working outside the English-speaking world. Despite their general theological conservatism, such individuals seem comfortable with so-called “functional equivalence” translation philosophy and are evidently accustomed to bold ventures in it every day. The majority of the contributors to this volume are leading international scholars in the field of biblical studies who also have a wealth of experience as Bible translators. This is a most welcome and distinctive characteristic of this group of writers. Most have been doing translation for years—and doing so with unsurpassed rigor and expertise. This is evident in the rich variety of illustrations they tumble out to explain their points and in the plethora of examples they use to buttress their arguments and confirm their statements. They are practitioners—even better, they are practitioners who understand theory. This may be the greatest strength of this book. A significant number of these same contributors have also served with Ronald Youngblood on the Committee on Bible Translation, so some of these essays function unintentionally as a kind of apologia for the New International Version (NIV).

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Even those of us who are not experts in Bible translation can readily grasp the importance of accuracy (or faithfulness) as a translation ideal. The contributors to this volume readily agree, yet they widen our horizons by explaining that accuracy is not the only criteria by which a good translation should be measured. In different ways, they consistently speak of a second category of qualities that translators should aspire to achieve, namely, those (like clarity, naturalness, and readability) that pertain to audience sensitivity and are so essential to closing the communication loop between sender and receiver. Finally, the authors speak in different ways of a third category of qualities that are of a more aesthetic and affective nature. Such ideals as beauty, orality (suitability for public reading), and dignity are also important to a translation’s popularity and durability. In short, there is more to a great translation than first meets the eye. The eighteen essays have been organized into three sections that address, respectively, the theory, history, and practice of Bible translation. The first six essays (chapters 1–6) examine the competing theoretical approaches (or so-called philosophies) of translation and evaluate their respective merits. The second set of six essays (chapters 7–12) explores the history of Bible translation, with particular attention to English Bible translation and with special reference to the KJV and the NIV. The third set of essays (chapters 13–18) addresses the actual practice of translation and includes some illuminating case studies in translation. The contributors to this volume have come together, not because of a uniform commitment to a particular philosophy of Bible translation, but because of their mutual appreciation for their friend Ronald Youngblood—an outstanding scholar, a gifted translator, and above all a person of Christian character and contagious joy. It is our hope that this volume will be not only a worthy recognition of his work but also a further contribution to the task for which he has shown such passion and ability—the disciplined art of Bible translation. The following chapter summaries are provided for the reader’s convenience and as an aid to locating treatments of specific topics of interest.

PART 1: THE THEORY OF BIBLE TRANSLATION In chapter 1, Moisés Silva offers personal reflections on an old Italian complaint that translators are traitors in the sense that they always (and necessarily) fall short of conveying the total meaning of a text in one language into another. His personal struggle early on to translate into English all the rich nuances of Spanish, his own first language, convinced him that any “literal” word-for-word translation strategy will prove both impossible and ultimately unhelpful. As he points out, even so-called literal Bible translations like the ESV reflect countless

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The Challenge of Bible Translation

interpretive decisions and departures from strict literalism. With literary sensitivity Silva explains that a faithful translator is obliged to convey in clear and readable form, not only the meanings of individual words and phrases, but something also of the structure, rhythm, and emotive elements of the original text. Ultimately the “accuracy” of a translation should be measured by the degree to which a translator has achieved all of these things. Silva sees the good translator, not as a traitor, then, but as someone who responsibly “transforms a text by transferring it from one linguistic-cultural context to another.” Kenneth Barker, longtime member of and spokesperson for the Committee on Bible Translation, which has among its many translation achievements the New International Version, sagely observes in chapter 2 that every group of Bible translators must establish at the very outset the type of translation they intend to produce. This in turn requires a conscious philosophical positioning of their translation project. After emphatically rejecting as naive the possibility of meaningful translation without at least some degree of interpretation, Barker acknowledges that a group of translators may choose to pursue a philosophy that leans either toward formal equivalence or toward dynamic equivalence. But he argues that it is also possible to adopt a balanced or mediating translation philosophy that combines the strengths of these respective options while avoiding the weaknesses inherent in their more extreme forms. Barker presents the NIV as an example of such optimal balance in its intentional pursuit of the four highly desirable translation characteristics of accuracy, clarity, beauty, and dignity. D. A. Carson (chapter 3) begins by noting two opposing trends in recent years: (1) the virtual triumph of functional-equivalence theory across the scholarly disciplines relevant to Bible translation, and (2) the contrasting rise of what he calls “linguistic conservatism”—a popular movement with a strongly expressed preference for more direct and “literal” translation methods. By pointedly challenging a couple of representatives of this latter perspective, he builds his case for functional equivalence as the only responsible approach to Bible translation for a general readership. As he then points out, the ideological gulf between the practitioners of these two competing approaches is nowhere more evident than in the recent debate over gender-accurate language in Bible translation. Carson devotes the remainder of his essay to sounding a caution on the limitations—and even risks, when taken to excess—of functional-equivalence theory. Responsible practitioners of functional equivalence will not make “reader response” the supreme criterion in translation decision, nor will they concede the skeptical assumption of an impassible dichotomy between message and meaning. He calls for limits on a variety of other factors as well, from the pursuit of

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comprehensibility and stylistic elegance at all costs to the dubious incorporation of opinionated study notes in the published text of Scripture. In chapter 4 Mark Strauss addresses current issues in the gender-language debate. The chapter is essentially a response to various charges leveled by Vern Poythress and Wayne Grudem against recent gender-accurate Bible translations (see The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy: Muting the Masculinity of God’s Word [2000]). Strauss begins by listing a surprising number of important areas of agreement between the two sides—shared convictions about the nature of authoritative Scripture, the translation enterprise, and even gender language itself. Strauss then moves on to critical areas of disagreement between the two camps. Most of these, he suggests, are rooted in different understandings of linguistics. Throughout this section Strauss repeatedly concedes that the genderinclusive approach may in some cases sacrifice some of the nuances of the original text. But such losses, he insists, are unavoidable and “come with the territory” of translation work. He urges the opponents of gender-inclusive translation to be equally up-front about the dimensions of meaning they are compelled to sacrifice through their approach. At the very least there should be a cessation on both sides of emotive charges that the opposition is deliberately distorting the Word of God. In chapter 5 the late Herbert Wolf, a longtime member of the Committee on Bible Translation, reflects from his own experiences on the communal dimensions of translation. He begins with a carefully nuanced acknowledgment that translators belong to larger communities and traditions that powerfully inform and shape (but—and here he shows his epistemological optimism—need never completely determine) their reading of the biblical text. Wolf also sees great benefits in the fact that most recent translations of the Bible have been group projects—not least that group arrangements enable translators to pool strengths and purge idiosyncrasies; and here he speaks (as only an experienced translation practitioner can) of the humbling aspect of having one’s work tested and improved by peers. He also sees translation as communal in the sense that it draws from related fields like archaeology and linguistics, a point he illustrates with fascinating insights from the field of rhetorical criticism. Finally, the potential readers of a translation also constitute a most relevant community, inasmuch as responsible translation decisions will always factor in readers’ anticipated responses to the text. In chapter 6 Charles Cosgrove reflects on the values that should inform and the approach that should characterize a Bible translation methodology compatible with the legitimate aspirations of postmodernism. The defining feature of such a legitimate postmodern approach, he suggests, is best encapsulated in the

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adjective holistic. Under this rubric he first considers translating the Bible as a whole (that is, as a canonical integrity), then translating the whole communicative effect of Scripture (that is, its genre and medium, as well as its language), and finally, translation as an activity of the whole people of God (the democratization of translation). Cosgrove’s first point—translating the Bible with canonical integrity— raises such difficult issues as whether the translation of the Old Testament should be guided in any way by how the New Testament purports to quote it. His second point affirms the postmodern trend to “challenge traditional distinctions between form and content and the hierarchy that subordinates one to the other.” At the same time, he notes, the postmodern view is properly sensitive to the enormous challenge (and downright trickiness) of achieving holistic equivalence in any communication transfer between distinct cultural-linguistic systems. Finally, Cosgrove argues that “the democratizing or ‘flattening’ cultural effect of postmodernity—epitomized by the Internet” means that the age of officially authorized versions is permanently over. He anticipates such a future scenario with optimism, because he believes that the inevitable diffusion of translations will only make the fullest sense of Scripture more accessible to all.

PART 2: THE HISTORY OF BIBLE TRANSLATION In chapter 7 Dick (R. T.) France provides a concise overview of the history of English Bible translation. He stresses throughout that English translation remains a never-ending challenge for two reasons: (1) manuscript resources continue to improve, and (2) the English language continues to change. After noting that ad hoc sections of the (Vulgate) biblical text were translated into English from as early as the seventh century, he describes the contributions of translation pioneers such as Wycliffe and Purvey in the fourteenth century and Tyndale and Coverdale in the sixteenth, and traces the development of English translation through a long list of works culminating in the Authorized Version of 1611—a Bible that “had no significant rival for 270 years.” As France points out, certain continuities of language and style were deliberately preserved throughout this long history (an English translation tradition, if you will), one result of which is that certain echoes of William Tyndale’s “vigorous, idiomatic” style persist even to the present. Particularly helpful is the care France takes to explain the motives behind these projects, the distinctive features of each translation, and the notable advances embodied in many of them. A flood of translations followed the publication of the Revised Version in 1885, and from this point the survey is necessarily more selective. Nonetheless, it is easy to see that readability and literary

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elegance have been among the keys to a translation’s relative popularity and longevity. The chapter concludes with a brief treatment of important contemporary issues in English Bible translation. On the topic of religious opposition to advances in translation, France notes candidly that “conservativism, in the sense of resistance to change, seems to affect people in matters of religion more readily than in other areas.” Other topics include the determination of the most reliable manuscripts, the choice between literal and dynamic translation alternatives, the vexed issue of gender inclusiveness, and consideration of a translation’s suitability for public reading. Of all the Bibles in the English language, the King James Version is properly regarded as the most influential. Alister McGrath’s In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (2001) is a valuable recent study of the King James Version’s magisterial contribution over a wide range of fields. In chapter 8 the late Walt Wessel reviews McGrath’s book through the lens of an experienced Bible translator and makes insightful comparisons and connections between the KJV and the translation projects (most notably, the NIV) of which he had been a part in recent years. Wessel begins by describing the KJV’s powerful influence on his own life as he emerged from a German-speaking American community in the earlier decades of the twentieth century—an influence that proved difficult to shake years later when he engaged in Bible translation himself. We see Wessel’s own values reflected in his applause for John Purvey’s stated commitment to produce the second Wycliffite Bible of 1384 by translating sentences and other linguistic meaning-groups rather than in a wooden word-for-word way. We see them again in his support of Luther’s insistence that a Bible translation “sound right” as well as prove accurate. Not surprisingly, Wessel is also intrigued by the innovative committee structure adopted by the translators of the KJV. Finally, he gently corrects McGrath’s understanding of “literal translation,” as well as his presumption that the eloquence of the KJV was purely accidental. Kent Eaton (chapter 9) offers an engaging profile of James “Diego” Thomson (1788–1854), one of the most creative and effective promoters of Bible distribution in nineteenth-century Protestant missions. A Scottish-born agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society—and a consummate colporteur—Thomson is considered by some “the patriarch of Protestantism and public education in South America.” His perambulatory missionary career, which began in 1816, spanned numerous countries of Central and South America, as well as Canada and Spain. In his tireless efforts to sow the seed of the Scriptures in all soils, he displayed remarkable powers of persuasion and a gift for judicious ecumenical compromise.

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Eaton’s profile of Thomson underscores the point that good translation by itself does not automatically ensure that the Scriptures will be read and understood by the groups for which they were designed. Priority must also be given to the effective delivery of the Scriptures—something that requires attention to such things as publishing, literacy education, ecumenical cooperation, product promotion, aggressive colportage, and efficient physical distribution systems. Dick France offers an overview of the history of Bible translation in English. Walt Wessel examines one great chapter of that history, the story of the King James Version; in chapter 10 John Stek focuses on another—the New International Version (1973; complete Bible 1978; rev. ed. 1984) and how it came to be. As a key participant in this story, Stek makes careful use of unpublished primary sources to narrate the development of the most popular English-language Bible on the market today. The chapter traces the genesis of the NIV to the initiatives of a layperson in the small (Dutch) Christian Reformed Church in America in the 1950s and records the growing confluence of energy for the project as the National Association of Evangelicals, then the New York Bible Society, and eventually Zondervan Publishing House joined the cause. The conscious positioning of this translation in relationship to other available English versions is made clear. It is worth noting that from the beginning all the actual translation work has been done by a vigilantly independent Committee on Bible Translation, whose steady efforts and periodically changing membership are carefully recorded here. Under the title “That Fabulous Talking Snake” (chapter 11), Ronald Veenker offers a controversial reflection on the first three chapters of Genesis. The essay focuses on the identity of the unusual serpent in the Garden of Eden. Veenker points out that the seductive snake is nowhere explicitly equated with Satan in this narrative, even though this assumption about the snake’s identity has prevailed in mainstream Christianity since the earliest centuries and been subsequently reinforced by influential Christian writers such as John Milton. Veenker suggests alternatively that the passage is about theodicy, not diabolical temptation, and that the snake is not Satan at all but an innocent animal made to speak so that, as a verbal and therefore patently intelligent creature, it can be held morally responsible and judged for its actions in opposition to the will of God. Certainly not every reader will agree with Veenker about the snake, but the inference he draws from this discussion is one that even his opponents will likely concede. Translators should not presume to make explicit that which ought properly to remain enigmatic or merely implicit in the text. As he puts it, “It is important for the task of translation, and even annotation, that the scholar try as much as possible to free himself from leading the reader to his own personal perspective” on a matter.

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David Noel Freedman and David Miano’s article on textual criticism—“Slip of the Eye: Accidental Omission in the Masoretic Tradition” (chapter 12)—is an excellent reminder that many disciplines impinge on the task of translation. As the authors point out, “The first step in Bible translation is the determination of the text.” The article deals with the phenomenon of haplography, a surprisingly common form of unintentional scribal error in the copying of ancient biblical manuscripts. Haplography occurs when a copyist’s eye, in response to some form of repetitiveness in the manuscript, is tricked into passing over and omitting characters, words, or even whole lines. Freedman and Miano classify the various ways the fallible human eye can slip; using the first two chapters of Genesis as a case study, they provide rather compelling evidence that such “mechanical errors” occurred in the textual transmission of even the most important biblical manuscripts. The conventional wisdom in textual criticism has been that the shorter version of a text is the more reliable, because (so it is assumed) it is more pristine and free of agenda-driven embellishments. The authors challenge this conventional wisdom by concluding that often the longer alternative reading is more reliable, because it has been less truncated by haplography.

PART 3: THE PRACTICE OF BIBLE TRANSLATION In chapter 13 Bruce Waltke offers a translation and exegesis of Agur’s confession in Proverbs 30:1–6. He challenges the assumption that these verses express a bitter epistemological skepticism (vv. 1–4), which a more orthodox and faith-filled editor subsequently endeavored to contradict and correct (vv. 5–6). Instead, Waltke makes a case (strengthened by appeals to wisdom parallels in Job and Baruch) for reading these six verses as the unified work of a single author. Moreover, he argues, the skeptical tone of the first four verses is not an absolute skepticism but a humble acknowledgment that deep truth remains forever elusive to the human mind until it seeks and finds it in the inspired revelation embodied in Scripture. As such, Agur’s confession constitutes “the most sustained argument in the Bible for the necessity of special revelation (through Israel’s Scripture) to bridge the gulf between the infinite and the finite.” Waltke concludes that the best foundation for Bible translation lies precisely in this conviction that “the Bible is God’s special revelation for humanity’s salvation and that God inspired its words.” Such a conviction certainly reinforces the urgency of the translation task, as well as the importance of translators handling the biblical text with care and reverence. Finally, the translator, inasmuch as he or she makes plain that which otherwise would remain enigmatic or unknown, is privileged to participate in God’s work of moving people from darkness and despair to illumination and hope.

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In chapter 14 Steven Voth offers an intriguing comparative analysis of how the Hebrew word s.edeq has been translated for—and understood by—Englishspeaking and Spanish-speaking readers in recent centuries. As Voth points out, s.edeq was translated for an English-speaking audience in the King James Version quite consistently as “righteousness” and for a Spanish-speaking audience by the magisterial Reina Valera Revisada as justicia (justice). While s.edeq has a breadth of meaning well in excess of any single English or Spanish word, the KJV translators’ decision to use “righteousness” moved Anglophone Christianity along a trajectory that prioritized personal morality to the relative neglect of other important nuances of s.edeq and the biblical theology it embodies. Conversely, the Spanish decision to go with justicia (justice) sensitized that particular culture more to the social imperatives and communal obligations of Christianity and perhaps somewhat less to the call to personal sanctification. The article considers historical factors that may have influenced these respective translation choices, and, even more important, it examines the profound impact of these word selections on English and Spanish readers’ respective understandings of the gospel message. Ultimately, Voth argues, even the ways in which the Bible was able historically to challenge, sensitize, and transform these two cultures was profoundly affected. The article is a sobering reminder that ideological realities can intrude into the translation process, often unconsciously, yet with huge consequences for both churches and cultures. In chapter 15 Andreas Köstenberger reviews the special challenges and opportunities faced by those endeavoring to translate the Gospel of John. As he does so, he discusses textual, background, ideological, exegetical, and stylistic considerations. Among the textual issues considered is whether the questionable account of the adulterous woman (7:53–8:11) should be retained in the English text—and if not, how its qualified status should be visually conveyed in the page layout. The many other issues addressed include the best rendering of Johannine references to time (for example, “the tenth hour”), and the fact that in John the conjunction kai has a considerably wider semantic range than the simple English word and. The most important ideological consideration addressed is how to translate hoi Ioudaioi (in the KJV, consistently translated “the Jews”) in ways that reflect complete translation integrity, sensitivity to the unique context of each Johannine usage of the term, and concern about the ever-present risk of contributing to the great evil of Christian anti-Semitism. At the end Köstenberger ranks nine leading English translations by their degree of apparent concurrence with the translation decisions he commends in this article. As it turns out, the NIV and ISV earn second place in the unofficial competition, with the recent TNIV taking top spot.

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In chapter 16 Douglas Moo considers the special challenges of translating the term sarx (KJV, “flesh”) in the Epistle to the Romans. This ubiquitous term is actually a “polymorphous concept”—one that has a number of quite distinct meanings, even in the apostle Paul’s own usage. Moo suggests five basic senses of sarx: (1) the physical material that covers a body’s bones, (2) the human body in its entirety, (3) human beings generally, (4) the human condition (as legitimately distinct from God), and (5) the state of human fallenness (in illegitimate opposition to God). The fallible translator is under considerable pressure to determine in each instance which meaning of sarx the apostle had in mind. Much is at stake, since the potential meanings of the term range from those with neutral connotations to those with highly negative associations. A tempting response, therefore, and one followed by a number of more “direct” Bible translations, is to apply a simple wordfor-word equation and let sarx come through consistently as “flesh.” The problems with this option are (1) that it leaves the determination of meaning entirely to the reader, which is an abdication of the translator’s responsibility, and (2) it only sets the reader up to confuse material reality (one meaning of sarx) with sinfulness (another meaning of sarx)—along the lines of the ancient Gnostic heresy. The TNIV actually uses twenty-eight different words or phrases to translate sarx, and Moo’s own labors in translation make him appreciate these efforts, including even the use in some instances of the admittedly awkward term “sinful nature.” In chapter 17 James Smith III profiles two venerable traditions of interpreting and translating the word hypostasis in relation to faith in Hebrews 11:1. The first tradition (which Smith traces to John Chrysostom and finds reinforced in the West by the Vulgate’s rendering of it as substantia) understands the term to refer to an objective “substance”—a divine gift through which the promised future has already become in part a reality. The second tradition, which he links to Martin Luther and the English translation pioneer William Tyndale, views it in the more subjective or psychological sense of “surety,” or being sure. Smith sees the former tradition sustained by, among other translations, the KJV (“now faith is the substance of things hoped for”), and the latter extending into the present through versions like the NASB (“now faith is the assurance of things hoped for”). Nevertheless, he argues, the subjective “surety” tradition now prevails in modern English versions, and it is also being recommended by the United Bible Societies to translators around the world through the resource materials the UBS makes available to them. Smith considers this state of affairs regrettable, not only because it perpetuates a flawed interpretation of hypostasis, but also because (from a pastoral perspective) it fails to convey a healthy God-centered vision of faith as “participation in divine realities already present.” The article

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concludes with a call for great vigilance against unwitting adherence to flawed traditions of translation. Finally, Larry Walker (chapter 18) analyzes the use of capital letters in translating Scripture into English. Neither biblical Hebrew nor Aramaic employed capital letters at all, and New Testament Greek did not use them in the way that English does. Since English begins proper nouns (in contrast to common nouns) with a capital letter, the English Bible translator is obliged to decide through judicious interpretation which biblical words are proper nouns, and therefore treated as such, and which are not. Walker provides an extensive set of comparative reference tables (twentyeight in all) that lay out how the KJV, the NIV, and an assortment of other English Bible translations handle the capitalization of the more difficult nouns found in Scripture. These tables (and the commentary that accompanies them) survey references to deity, names of persons and places, titles of mythical beings, personifications, and terms connected to religious ceremonies. Walker’s analysis is helpful in detecting capitalization trends over time, as well as the general tendencies of different translations. Some capitalization decisions, as he points out, are purely matters of style and preference. Others, like the translator’s choice between “spirit” and “Spirit,” can be of enormous significance. NOTES 1. Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1996), 32. 2. See, for example, David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2–19; and Roger Olson, “The Future of Evangelical Theology,” Christianity Today 42, no. 2 (9 February 1998): 40. 3. Cited in Hugh T. Kerr, ed., A Compend of Luther’s Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), 16. 4. Walls, The Missionary Movement, 26.

PA R T O N E

THE THEORY OF B I B L E T R A N S L AT IO N

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1 A r e T r a n s l at o r s Traitors? Some Pers o n al Reflections. 1

Moisés Silva

D

uring my student days, while looking over a Spanish theological journal, I happened to notice an article on a topic I knew would be of interest to one of my professors. When I brought it to his attention, he asked me whether I would be willing to translate the essay into English for him. Since Spanish is my mother tongue, he figured I’d be able to come up with a rough translation quite quickly. I thought so, too, but to my surprise, the project became a nightmare. I labored over virtually every sentence and felt burdened that at no point was I communicating in a truly satisfactory manner what I knew to be the “total” meaning of the Spanish. Possibly for the first time I sensed what factors may have motivated the old Italian complaint, Traduttore traditore—“A translator is a traitor.”2 This incident was rather puzzling and troubling to me. True, I was unduly concerned over precision—my teacher needed only a general understanding of the article’s main points (and I was too afraid of writing down something that might be misleading). It was also true that at that stage in my life, although I had served as an interpreter on a few occasions, I had little experience in the translation of written literature. But my inadequacy as a translator was not the real problem. What was disturbing to me was that I found it much easier to render Greek and Hebrew into English, even though my knowledge of those languages was almost infinitely inferior to my knowledge of Spanish! In a very important sense, my understanding of the latter (simply because it was a living language learned from infancy) was far greater than the understanding that anyone can have of an ancient language no longer spoken. Yet I struggled to express in English the meaning of a Spanish sentence in a way that I did not experience when 37

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translating a biblical text (naturally, I might struggle trying to figure out what the Greek and Hebrew meant, but that’s a different question). In truth, there is a simple solution to the mystery. The answer is twofold. First, the very fact that Spanish was a living language for me meant that I was much more conscious of its subtleties and connotations than I could be of comparable nuances in Greek and Hebrew. As a result, I was fully aware of my failure to reproduce such features in English, whereas in the case of the biblical languages, well, ignorance is bliss.3 True, increased practice in translation develops one’s skills in finding adequate equivalents, but it takes years of intensive work—to say nothing of the need for an inherent linguistic and literary gift— to become a truly competent translator. There is an important lesson here for the many students, and even professional scholars, who think that after two or three years of Greek they are qualified to translate the New Testament. But I am more interested here in the second part of the answer. College and seminary courses in the biblical languages consist primarily of guiding the student in translating word-for-word.4 If the resulting rendering violates English syntax or makes no sense at all, changes may be introduced, but as a rule these translations are stilted (sometimes barely intelligible to a layperson) and rarely express the thought of the original in the most natural way that the rich resources of the English language make available. Most of us have thus been led to believe that if we manage to represent the Greek and Hebrew words in as close a oneto-one correspondence as possible, we have succeeded in the task of translation. But who would consider successful a Spanish-to-English translation that had such renderings as “I have cold in the feet” (instead of “My feet are cold”) or “He has ten years” (instead of “He is ten years old”)—even though these sentences conform to English syntax and their meaning can be figured out? Perhaps a fuller illustration from Spanish may be helpful. The Larousse Gran Diccionario Español-Inglés, English-Spanish (1991) has a foreword in both languages; presumably, the editor wrote it in Spanish and himself translated it into English. The Spanish of the last paragraph, if translated literally, would read like this: “We would sin of ingratitude if we did not mention finally the names of . . . valuable collaborators without whose help the execution of our effort would have been much more arduous, and [we would sin] of immodesty if we did not beg our readers to have the courtesy of indicating to us the omissions and imperfections that we might have incurred, errare humanum est, so that we may emend them in future editions.”5 Such a literal translation is not only too long, awkward, and complicated for acceptable English style, but it also reflects certain cultural elements that are out of place in an English-speaking society. Accordingly, the English foreword reads

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very businesslike: “Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to . . . , whose valuable assistance greatly facilitated the task. Since errare humanum est, we would also be grateful to readers for kindly bringing omissions and imperfections to our notice so that they may be corrected in future editions.” Admittedly, this is an extreme example, but the principle it illustrates needs to be appreciated. All successful translations of literature (for example, contemporary German novels) sound natural, as though they had originally been written in English (while also preserving a feel for the original cultural setting). Therefore, they are more easily read and understood than if they reflected the foreign syntax and word usage. (Incidentally, since the message communicates more clearly, one can argue that they are more accurate than literal renderings would be.) In contrast, one can hardly call accurate or faithful the KJV’s wordfor-word translation of Micah 1:11—“Pass ye away, thou inhabitant of Saphir, having thy shame naked: the inhabitant of Zaanan came not forth in the mourning of Beth-ezel; he shall receive of you his standing.” The preface to the recently released English Standard Version describes its philosophy of translation as “essentially literal” and as “word-for-word” (over against the thought-for-thought approach of some modern Bible versions).6 Literalness in translation, however, is something of an illusion, and although the preface goes on to qualify these claims (“Every translation is at many points a trade-off between literal precision and readability”), the unwary reader can hardly suspect how many major syntactical transformations are adopted by the ESV. Here is a fairly word-for-word rendering of Hebrews 7:20–22 (but respecting the word order required by English): And according to which [= inasmuch as it was] not without an oath—for on the one hand the ones having become priests are without an oath, but he with an oath through the one saying to him, “The Lord swore and will not regret: ‘You are a priest forever’”—according to so much Jesus became a guarantee of a better covenant. Some versions (e.g., the NASB), while making this complex sentence a bit more understandable, retain the basic structure of the original. The ESV, however, renders it this way: And it was not without an oath. For those who formerly became priests were made such without an oath, but this one was made a priest with an oath by the one who said to him: “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever.’” This makes Jesus the guarantor of a better covenant.

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By (1) breaking up one long sentence into three, then (2) transforming a binary comparative structure (with a long parenthesis in the middle) into a set of independent clauses, and finally (3) adding quite a few items absent from the Greek (“it was,” “formerly,” “were made such,” “was made,” “This makes”), the ESV successfully clarifies the statement to modern readers and makes its meaning clear to them. But to call such a rendering literal (let alone word-for-word) is a fantasy. It is not surprising that my illustration comes from the letter to the Hebrews. Although examples of this sort could probably be found in every book of the Bible, the author of Hebrews makes greater use of the stylistic resources of Greek than other New Testament writers do. And here precisely is part of our problem. Because most New Testament books (as well as Old Testament Hebrew narrative) are characterized by a fairly straightforward syntax, many of whose features can be paralleled in English syntax, we are lulled into thinking that literal renderings of the Greek text “work.”7 But just because a certain Greek syntactical pattern can be reproduced in English, that hardly means it should, as though such reproduction were the best or most faithful representation of the original. Things are quite different in the translation of classical Greek literature generally. A recent and successful translator of Plato’s dialogues, R. E. Allen, defends his method in a manner reminiscent of arguments in favor of literal Bible translations: Claims of fidelity presuppose that the underlying Greek text is fully understood, that is, interpreted, and that translations can be done in terms of this interpretation. Interpretive translations, like newspaper editorials, have their value; but they decide in advance issues on which students may reasonably differ and on which the English reader may be invited to make up his or her own mind. Some degree of interpretation, no doubt, is unavoidable, and a wholly neutral translation which preserved every ambiguity and all the overtones of connotation would require constant reference to the Greek in order to make sense of the English. Yet neutrality, no less than fidelity, remains an important value in translation. Let no man tell you what is in the text of Plato if you have means of finding out for yourself.8 He goes on to argue that a literal approach should be part of the translation process (while acknowledging that “literalness requires interpretation after all”). It soon becomes clear, however, that literalness for this classical scholar means something a little different from what it means to many biblical students. On the

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very first page of the translation, when Socrates says that a certain Meletus has brought an indictment against him, Euthyphro asks him what the charge is, to which Socrates replies, ouk agennne m — “not an ignoble one,”—but Allen renders it, “One that does him credit.”9 Or consider one of the statements by Socrates in his speech before the Athenians. Translated word-for-word (as much as English syntax allows), it reads: “And certainly and entirely, O Athenian men, this I ask of you and beg for.” Allen’s rendering: “So I must specifically ask one thing of you, Gentlemen.”10 And yet, typical translations of classical Greek literature are even freer (though it is also true in classical studies that some scholars argue in favor of a very literal method of translating). As an illustration, take the beginning sentence of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. First I provide a literal rendering: Thucydides an Athenian wrote down the war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians, how they warred toward one another, beginning immediately [with] its establishment and expecting [it] to be both great and more worthy of note than those that had taken place before, judging that both were at their height for it in all preparation and seeing the other Greek[s] banding together to either [side], some on the one hand immediately, but some also intending [to do so].11 Here is Rex Warner’s translation (1954; Penguin Books, 1972): Thucydides the Athenian wrote the history of the war fought between Athens and Sparta, beginning the account at the very outbreak of the war, in the belief that it was going to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past. My belief was based on the fact that the two sides were at the very height of their power and preparedness, and I saw, too, that the rest of the Hellenic world was committed to one side or the other; even those who were not immediately engaged were deliberating on the courses which they were to take later. For comparison, I also quote the earlier translation by Richard Crawley (Loeb Classical Library, 1910): Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of

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The Challenge of Bible Translation both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation.

It should be pointed out that, as far as Thucydides’ style is concerned, this is not an abnormally difficult example; much more complicated passages could readily be found. And of course, even these are child’s play in comparison with the demands that Greek poetry places on translators. Here are the last lines of book 9 of the Odyssey, first in the Loeb translation by A. T. Murray (1919): And as soon as early Dawn appeared, the rosy-fingered, I roused my comrades, and bade them themselves to embark and to loose the stern cables. So they went on board straightway and sat down upon the benches, and sitting well in order smote the grey sea with their oars. Thence we sailed on, grieved at heart, glad to have escaped death, though we had lost our dear comrades. Next is the poetic and highly regarded version by Robert Fitzgerald (1961): When the young Dawn with finger tips of rose touched the world, I roused the men, gave orders to man the ship, cast off the mooring lines; and filing in to sit beside the rowlocks oarsmen in line dipped oars in the grey sea. So we moved out, sad in the vast offing, having our precious lives, but not our friends. The first time I taught extrabiblical Hellenistic Greek, I had a small group of advanced college students who had shown strong competence in two years of New Testament Greek. One of them was an unusually gifted student who, nevertheless, felt quite frustrated and discouraged because of the difficulties she was experiencing. How was it possible that she could do so well understanding and translating the Greek of the New Testament and yet feel so lost working with Epictetus? Almost all students I’ve taught since then have had a comparable reaction, even though the language of Epictetus is in fact relatively simple. How does one explain this phenomenon? Part of the answer is that biblical students are dependent—to a much greater degree than they realize—on their familiarity with the contents of the New Testament. There is no shame in this. The main reason we understand Time magazine well is that we are very familiar with the historical context in which American English is spoken. The further removed we are from the context of

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a document (e.g., in time—say, Shakespeare—or in subject matter—legal documents), the greater our difficulties in making sense of it. A student’s basic familiarity with the biblical subject matter and form of expression, over against an unfamiliarity with the concerns and phraseology of Hellenistic philosophers, has much to do with the frustrations he or she will experience moving from one to the other.12 But that explanation does not get to the heart of the linguistic problem. As already suggested, an exclusive (or nearly exclusive) acquaintance with the simple narrative of the Gospels or with the unassuming discourse of the Pauline letters, combined with the instinctive tendency (confirmed and encouraged by the instructor) to represent the text by means of one-to-one English correspondences whenever possible, creates a conception of the workings of the Greek language that is derived from an alien structure. On the other hand, intensive training translating clauses and sentences that cannot be rendered word-for-word and thus require restructuring would give students an entrée into the genius (i.e., the authentic character) of the foreign tongue. It would also help them see much more clearly that such restructuring could be the preferable method of rendering even when it may not appear “necessary.” The point here is that a nonliteral translation, precisely because it may give expression to the genius of the target language (in this case English), can do greater justice to that of the source language (Greek). For example, one of the distinctive features of Greek syntax is the frequent use of adverbial participles. Many of these can be rendered literally without violating English grammar, and the resulting translations are intelligible, yet even literal versions like the NASB and the ESV wisely resort to the use of conjunctions modifying finite verbs (indicative mood). Thus, “Having seen the star” becomes “When they saw the star” (Matt 2:10); “Titus, being a Greek,” becomes “Titus, though he was a Greek” (Gal 2:3); “we will reap, not giving up,” becomes “we will reap, if we do not give up” (6:9). An alternative way of restructuring the participial construction may be illustrated from Acts 8:27, where “He had come worshiping” becomes “He had come to worship.” Notice that all these translations reflect interpretative decisions. The last reference, for example, excludes the possible (though unlikely) interpretation that the Ethiopian eunuch was involved in worship during the course of his travel. It is true, of course, that scholars are generally agreed about the proper way to render the participial clauses in these particular verses. But general agreement is not the same as total certainty. One could make the case, for instance, that the first three examples should be rendered as causal participles. While not many would be persuaded that such renderings are preferable, the truth remains that

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even literal English versions of the Bible (to echo Allen’s objection quoted above) have decided “in advance issues on which students may reasonably differ and on which the English reader may be invited to make up his or her own mind.” Again, one could complain that by changing the participles to finite verbs, these translations unnecessarily remove English readers one additional step from the original, thus preventing them from experiencing something of the “feel” of Greek style (a common argument against modernized versions of ancient texts). Such objections, however, would not be valid grievances against the ESV. And by the same token, one should be cautious about using arguments of this sort to criticize functional-equivalence versions. There may indeed be instances where the NIV, for example, adds an excessive amount of information to the text. But defects in the application of a method are no argument against the method itself. So far as philosophy of translation is concerned, the NIV merely seeks to apply, in a more thorough and systematic way than “traditional” versions, the principles that all versions are using when they transform the syntactical structure of Greek participial clauses. Those principles are clarity and naturalness of expression.13 But there is an additional and serious problem with the argument that Bible versions should be more or less neutral with regard to texts where the interpretation is debatable. Or as it is usually put, “What is ambiguous in the original should be left ambiguous in the translation.” The main flaw in this principle (whatever truth it may contain) is the assumption that typical English readers recognize an ambiguity when they see one. Take 1 Corinthians 5:5, which the ESV renders quite literally, “You are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.” Some people object to the NIV rendering “sinful nature” instead of the literal “flesh” for various reasons, including their concern that the Greek word sarx is ambiguous, and that therefore the NIV immediately slants the text in a particular direction. But it would be delusion to think that the literal translation “flesh” does not slant the text for the average reader, who needs a book or a preacher to tell him or her what the options are (of course, a book or a preacher can clarify those options regardless of which version is being read). At least the NIV provides a footnote with the alternate renderings “his body” and “the flesh.” A different type of example is “your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess 1:3). That is the basically word-by-word rendering of the ESV.14 In contrast, the NIV interprets all the genitival constructions as follows: “your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (my emphasis). Now one may legitimately ask whether adding the italicized

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phrases is the most faithful way to represent the text, but it would be naive to think that the average believer in the pew immediately recognizes the ambiguities inherent in the Greek genitive—let alone that he or she has the means to reach an informed opinion regarding the meaning without at least consulting other translations. But if in either case (with the NIV or the ESV) it is necessary to consult something or someone, then what harm has been done by providing a more intelligible rendering that represents, at the very least, a defensible understanding of the text? A few years ago, Douglas R. Hofstadter, the author of influential works in the areas of cognition and creativity (e.g., Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979), published a remarkable book on the art of translation.15 The work is built on and around a brief poem, “A une Damoyselle malade” (To an ill damsel), written in the sixteenth century by Clément Marot. I reproduce the verse below. The middle column gives a very literal translation, which is not always intelligible. The right column provides a rendering that is still basically word-for-word but seeks to be more helpful (in an approach that approximates that of literal Bible versions).16 Ma mignonne Je vous donne Le bon jour; Le séjour C’est prison. Guérison Recouvrez, Puis ouvrez Votre porte Et qu’on sorte Vitement, Car Clément Le vous mande. Va, friande De ta bouche, Qui se couche En danger Pour manger Confitures; Si tu dures Trop malade, Couleur face Tu prendras, Et perdra

My cute one I give thee The good day; The stay It’s prison. Healing Recover, Then open Thy door And that one leaves Quickly, For Clément Informs it to thee. Go, dainty one Of your mouth, Who lies down In danger To eat Preserves; If you last Too sick, Color of face You will take on, And will lose

My darling, I bid thee Good day; Thy stay in bed Is like prison. Thy health Recover, Then open Thy door And go out Quickly, For Clément Orders thee. Go, you who likes to indulge Your mouth, Who is lying down In danger, So that you might eat Some preserves; If you remain a long time Very sick, Pale You will become, And you will lose

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The Challenge of Bible Translation Líembonpoint. Dieu te doint Santé bonne, Ma mignonne

The stoutness. God give you Good health, My cute one.

Your plumpness. May God grant you Good health, My darling.

The problem with a literal translation of the poem is that, even though it may convey fairly accurately its (cognitive) contents, it fails to reproduce its formal and emotive elements—the very things that make the poem what it is. The verse is made up of twenty-eight lines, each line consists of three syllables (with the stress on the last syllable), there are fourteen rhyming couplets (AA, BB, CC, etc.), and, interestingly, the units of sense are conveyed primarily by couplets composed of the non-rhyming lines (lines 2–3, 4–5, 6–7, etc.). Among other features, note that the first and last line are the same, and that the author has inserted his name in the middle. Each of the seventeen chapters in Hofstadter’s book includes several translations of the poem—almost ninety translations in all! Many of these are by the author himself, but he also includes efforts by a variety of acquaintances who were challenged to capture the various characteristics of the poem. Although some of the resulting translations cannot be taken too seriously, it is truly illuminating to see the great variety of legitimate renderings that are possible, depending on which features the translator decides to bring out. As an illustration, I reproduce only three of them for the reader’s amusement.17 Note that the first version retains the three-syllable lines but does not attempt to make them rhyme. The second translation (middle column) has rhyming couplets, but these are the ones that convey the sense units. In the last version, as in the original French, the units of sense are carried by the non-rhyming couplets. My sweet maid, You I wish A good day; Your sickbed Is a jail. Total health Please regain, Then unlatch Your room’s door And go out With full speed, For Clement Does insist. Go, gourmande,

Lover mine, Here’s a sign Of my love, Turtledove. You’re not well, I can tell. All cooped up, Buttercup? How about Going out? Hit the town! Lose that frown, Little pet! Clem’s all set

Babe o’ mine Gal divine, Here’s a kiss, It ain’t bliss Bein’ sick. Get up quick, Take a spin! Don’t stay in Where it’s dark. For a lark, Go on out, Jump about— Clem’s command! Hey, gourmande,

Chapter 1: Are Translators Traitors? Thou whose mouth Lies abed Under threat, Off to eat Fruit preserves; If thou stay’st Sick too long, A pale shade Wilt acquire, And wilt lose Thy round shape. May God grant Thee good health, My sweet maid.

For some fun, Honey bun. In the mood For some food? Then let’s munch, Honeybunch. If you stick At home sick, You’ll get pale, Nightingale. Hope tonight You’re all right, Feeling fine, Lover mine.

47 You whose wish Is a dish Full of fruit, You should scoot From your bed, And instead Get some sun. Come on, hon’— Losin’ weight Makes your great Figure flat. Don’t do that! Just get fine, Babe o’ mine!

Notice that all three of these translations preserve the basic structure and rhythm of the poem (they also convey its emotive aspect much better than the literal translations above), but only by abandoning almost completely the notion of word-for-word equivalences.18 A different but defensible approach would be to use an alternate poetic structure—say, a smaller number of longer lines—that might allow the translator to preserve features otherwise lost.19 Another problem is that the last two renderings above use very colloquial and trendy language and thus take away from the dignified quality of the original. In the very nature of the case, there cannot be one definitive translation of the poem; several renderings are needed in order to capture its various features. It should be obvious by now that “faithfulness” in translation is neither a simple concept to define nor an easy goal to achieve. Are we thus obligated to conclude that translators are traitors? I would prefer to say, traduttore tramuttatore (or even better, traspositore). The translator is someone who, like it or not, transforms a text by transferring it from one linguistic-cultural context to another. In such a process, it is inevitable that some things will be left behind and that others will be picked up along the way. The King James translators, for all their skill, failed to preserve countless features—both formal and semantic—that were present in the original Hebrew and Greek texts. By the same token, their mere use of seventeenth-century English ensured that, at virtually every turn, they would add features absent from the original. Yet this simple reality does not for a moment take anything away from their magnificent achievement. They responsibly interpreted the text, then transposed it to a different historical setting and thereby transmuted it into a form it did not have before. But that hardly means they betrayed the text. On the contrary, such a transformation made it possible for millions to hear and understand its message.

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The kinds of language games played by Clément Marot in his little poem are seldom if ever to be found in the biblical text (even in its poetic sections), but the Bible consists of language all the same, and the fundamental challenges of translation are certainly no different. If the ideal of biblical translation were to represent the original as much as possible in a word-for-word manner, then there would be little room for variety. The multiplicity of modern Bible versions, while thought by many to be a great disadvantage for the church today, is instead reason for exultation. To be sure, the differences among these versions can create confusion; new problems have surfaced that still have not been solved. It remains true, however, that contemporary Bible readers, precisely because they are not bound to one or two versions, enjoy certain remarkable advantages over previous generations. For them, Scripture, read through different lenses, shines all the brighter. NOTES 1. It is a pleasure to offer this essay to Ron Youngblood—or Sangrejoven, as the translators of the Nueva Versión Internacional, in all good humor, like to refer to him. I am sure that they join me in gratitude to him for the amount of time and effort he devoted to the work of this Bible translation. Though he modestly minimized his competence in Spanish, time and again in the course of our meetings he showed the enviable skills of a good translator, namely, sensitivity to the meaning of the original text and a genuine feel for language. The extent of his contribution is difficult to overstate. 2. I haven’t been able to trace the origin of this oft-quoted (and sometimes abused) expression. Remarks about the alleged impossibility of translation, especially when dealing with poetry, are legion. With regard to the Bible, this conception is ancient. Rabbi Judah is reported to have said, “If one translates a verse literally, he is a liar; if he adds thereto, he is a blasphemer and a libeler” (b. Kiddushin 49a; see The Babylonian Talmud, Seder Nashim 8: Kiddushin, ed. I. Epstein [London: Soncino, 1936], 246). 3. My experience thus illustrates a fundamental principle of the universe: The less one knows, the quicker one can form an opinion. 4. Note that in modern-language courses students are seldom asked to translate written texts into English. 5. “Pecaríamos de ingratitud si no mencionásemos por·último los nombres de . . . , valiosas colaboradoras sin cuya ayuda la ejecución de nuestro empeño hubiese sido mucho más ardua, y de inmodestia si no rogásemos a nuestros lectores que tengan la amabilidad de indicarnos las omisiones e imperfecciones en que hubiéramos incurrido, errare humanum est, para enmendarlas en ediciones futuras.” 6. I should emphasize that I consider the ESV a very useful work, and I was happy to make a minor contribution in reviewing one of the NT books. 7. I vividly recall a comment by one of my teachers (a man of extraordinary linguistic competence, I should add) to the effect that the Bible is eminently translatable, particularly in comparison with other ancient literature, such as Homer.

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8. R. E. Allen, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), xii. 9. Ibid., 41 (Euth. 2a). 10. Ibid., 79 (Apol. 17c). The Greek reads, kai mentoi kai pany, om andres Athemnaioi, touto hymomn deomai kai pariemai. The word mentoi is an asseverative particle, while pany is an adverb meaning “altogether” (often used with verbs in the sense “very, exceedingly,” etc.). The combination of these two terms here appears to be unique and lends much emphasis to the statement; the phrase could be rendered, “And by all means,” “And most certainly.” H. N. Fowler’s translation (for the Loeb series) is, “And, men of Athens, I urgently beg and beseech you” (my emphasis). 11. Thoukydidesm Athe mnaios xynegrapse [= synegrapse] ton polemon tomn Peloponnesio m mn kai Athe mnaiomn, homs epoleme sm an pros alle mlous, arxamenos euthys kathistamenou kai elpisas megan te esethai kai axiologomtaton tomn progegene mmenomn, tekmairomenos hoti akmazontes te e sm an es [= eis] auton amphoteroi paraskeue m te m pase m kai to allo Helle nm ikon horonm xynistamenon [= synistamenon] pros hekaterous, to men euthys, to de kai dianooumenon. 12. Ideally, students learning biblical Greek should do so only within the context of learning Hellenistic Greek generally (with at least a smattering of the late classical period). Of course, such a program would easily require a tripling of the time and effort nowadays devoted to the subject, and it would be virtually impossible to persuade students (or even faculty and administrators) that one needs to “waste time” with Plato and Polybius and Plutarch in order to understand the language of Paul. But can one imagine a person with two years of college French daring to translate (or write an exegetical commentary on) the plays of Molière? 13. As Martin Luther put it, “what is the point of needlessly adhering so scrupulously and stubbornly to words which one cannot understand anyway? Whoever would speak German must not use Hebrew style. Rather he must see to it—once he understands the Hebrew author—that he concentrates on the sense of the text, asking himself, ‘Pray tell, what do the Germans say in such a situation?’ Once he has the German words to serve the purpose, let him drop the Hebrew words and express the meaning freely in the best German he knows.” See Luther’s Works, ed. E. T. Bachmann (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1960), 35:213–14. Quoted by Ernst R. Wendland, “Martin Luther, the Father of Confessional, Functional-Equivalence Bible Translation: Part 1,” Notes on Translation 9/1 (1995): 16–36. This article includes many other insightful quotations. 14. Even the ESV, however, interprets the phrase te ms elpidos tou kyriou he mmomn (lit., “the hope of our Lord”) by rendering it as an objective genitive, although theoretically it could also mean “the hope that our Lord gives.” 15. Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (New York: Basic Books, 1997). This volume—which is partly autobiographical, interweaves a great variety of themes, and is highly idiosyncratic—runs to more than 600 pages and could have profited from some serious pruning (one is left with the impression that the author was determined to make some use of every illustration he had accumulated in his files). Nevertheless, those who persevere to the end will be greatly rewarded by the richness and insightfulness that characterize much of the material. 16. The change in pronouns in the middle of the poem from vous (respectful) to tu (familiar) would correspond formally to a change from you to thou. I have inverted these two, however, because modern English speakers tend to view thou as more respectful.

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17. These translations are found respectively in the sections entitled Poems III (13b), IV (15b), and X (46b). 18. It is worth noting that literal translations are often said to use the notion of “formal correspondence,” but in the case of poems (or other styles that make heavy use of such formal constraints as alliteration, meter, and rhyme), the distinctive form of the original gets lost. And we should remember that all standard translations of acrostic poems in the Bible (e.g., Ps 119, where the verses of each stanza begin with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet) fail to preserve the acrostic, even though that is their most prominent formal feature. 19. One of the translations in Hofstadter’s book (Poems XIII) is composed as a classical sonnet.

2 B i b l e T r a n s l at i o n Philosophie s wit h Special Reference to t h e N e w I n t e r n at i o n a l Version 1

Kenneth L. Barker

W

hen translators set out to translate the Bible, among the first questions they must face are, What type of translation do we want to produce, and what translation philosophy, theory, method, or approach must we follow in order to achieve the desired results? To ask these questions, though, raises another question: What types of Bible translations are there? Bible translators and linguists speak primarily of two major types of translations. The first is referred to variously as formal or complete or literal or gloss equivalence. Here the translator pursues a word-for-word rendering as much as possible. The New American Standard Bible (NASB) and New King James Version (NKJV) are good examples of this approach. Fortunately it is frequently possible to translate literally and still retain contemporary English idiom and excellent literary style. For example, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is a straightforward translation of the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1, and it is also good English. So why change it? In fact, why not follow this more literal approach everywhere and all the time, with an absolute minimum of interpretation? Moisés Silva responds, “Translators who view their work as pure renderings rather than interpretations only delude themselves; indeed, if they could achieve some kind of noninterpretative rendering, their work would be completely useless.”2 Daniel Taylor reinforces the point: “All translation is interpretation, as George Steiner and others have pointed out. At every point, the translator is required to interpret, evaluate, judge, and 51

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choose.”3 Bob Sheehan correctly states that the “idea of a noninterpretive translation is a mirage.”4 Several years ago I wrote about this very issue: Translation without interpretation is an absolute impossibility, for at every turn the translator is faced with interpretative decisions in different manuscript readings, grammar, syntax, the specific semantic possibilities of a Hebrew or Greek word for a given context, English idiom, and the like. For example, should a particular occurrence of the Hebrew word ,eres≥ be contextually nuanced as “earth,” “land,” or something else? . . . In the very act of deciding, the translator has interpreted.5 Moisés Silva further indicates the following: A successful translation requires (1) mastery of the source language—certainly a much more sophisticated knowledge than one can acquire over a period of four or five years; (2) superb interpretation skills and breadth of knowledge so as not to miss the nuances of the original; and (3) a very high aptitude for writing in the target language so as to express accurately both the cognitive and the affective elements of the message.6 And biblical scholar Ephraim Speiser reminds us of the translator’s challenge: The main task of a translator is to keep faith with two different masters, one at the source and the other at the receiving end. . . . If he is unduly swayed by the original, and substitutes word for word rather than idiom for idiom, he is traducing what he should be translating, to the detriment of both source and target. And if he veers too far in the opposite direction, by favoring the second medium at the expense of the first, the result is a paraphrase.7 Speiser concludes by declaring that a “faithful translation is by no means the same thing as a literal rendering.”8 Unfortunately, then, it is often not possible to translate literally and retain natural, idiomatic, clear English. Consider the NASB rendering of Matthew 13:20: “The one on whom seed was sown on the rocky places, this is the man who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy.” The NIV reads: “The one who received the seed that fell on rocky places is the man who hears the word and at once receives it with joy.” Here the NASB is so woodenly literal that the result is a cumbersome, awkward, poorly constructed English sentence. The NIV, on the other hand, has a natural and smooth style without sacrificing accuracy.

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The second major type of translation is referred to variously as dynamic or functional or idiomatic equivalence. Here the translator attempts a thought-forthought rendering. The Good News Bible (GNB; also known as Today’s English Version, TEV), the New Living Translation (NLT), God’s Word (GW), the New Century Version (NCV), and the Contemporary English Version (CEV) are some of the examples of this approach to the translation challenge. Such versions seek to find the best modern cultural equivalent that will have the same effect the original message had in its ancient cultures. Obviously this approach is a much freer one. At this point the reader may be surprised that the NIV has not been included as an illustration of either of these two major types of translations. The reason is that, in my opinion, it fits neither. After considerable personal study, comparison, and analysis, I have become convinced that, in order to do justice to translations like the NIV and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), scholars must recognize the validity of a third major category of translation, namely, the balanced or mediating type. To discuss this subject intelligently, we must have a working definition of formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Eugene Nida gives us important insight: Since “there are . . . no such things as identical equivalents,” . . . one must in translation seek to find the closest possible equivalent. However, there are fundamentally two different types of equivalence: one which may be called formal and another which is primarily dynamic. Formal equivalence focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content. . . . Viewed from this formal orientation, one is concerned that the message in the receptor language should match as closely as possible the different elements in the source language. This means . . . that the message in the receptor culture is constantly compared with the message in the source culture to determine standards of accuracy and correctness. The type of translation which most closely typifies this structural equivalence might be called a “gloss translation,” in which the translator attempts to reproduce as literally and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original. . . . [Student] needs call for a relatively close approximation to the structure of the early . . . text, both as to form (e.g., syntax and idioms) and content (e.g., themes and concepts). Such a translation would require numerous footnotes in order to make the text fully comprehensible.

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The Challenge of Bible Translation A gloss translation of this type is designed to permit the reader to identify himself as fully as possible with a person in the source-language context, and to understand as much as he can of the customs, manner of thought, and means of expression. For example, a phrase such as “holy kiss” (Romans 16:16) in a gloss translation would be rendered literally, and would probably be supplemented with a footnote explaining that this was a customary method of greeting in New Testament times. In contrast, a translation which attempts to produce a dynamic rather than a formal equivalence is based upon “the principle of equivalent effect.” . . . In such a translation one is not so concerned with matching the receptor-language message with the source-language message, but with the dynamic relationship . . . , that the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message. A translation of dynamic equivalence aims at complete naturalness of expression and tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture; it does not insist that he understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend the message. Of course, there are varying degrees of such dynamicequivalence translations. . . . [Phillips, e.g.,] seeks for equivalent effect. . . . In Romans 16:16 he quite naturally translates “greet one another with a holy kiss” as “give one another a hearty handshake all around.” Between the two poles of translating (i.e., between strict formal equivalence and complete dynamic equivalence) there are a number of intervening grades, representing various acceptable standards of literary translating.9

Edward L. Greenstein further describes the principle of dynamic equivalence as proposing a “three-stage translation process: analysis of the expression in the source language to determine its meaning, transfer of this meaning to the target language, and restructuring of the meaning in the world of expression of the target language.”10 Two observations may be helpful at this point. First, it is instructive that the NIV retains “Greet one another with a holy kiss” in Romans 16:16. Second, it is significant that Eugene Nida seems to open the door for a mediating position between the two main translation philosophies, theories, or methods. In general terms, all Bible translation is simply “the process of beginning with something

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(written or oral) in one language (the source language) and expressing it in another language (the receptor language).”11 A translation cannot be said to be faithful that does not pay adequate attention to both the source language and the receptor language. A distinction must be made between dynamic equivalence as a translation principle and dynamic equivalence as a translation philosophy. The latter exists only when a version sets out to produce a dynamic-equivalence rendering from start to finish, as the GNB did. The foreword to the Special Edition Good News Bible indicates that word-for-word translation does not accurately convey the force of the original, so the GNB uses instead the “dynamic equivalent,” the words having the same force and meaning today as the original text had for its first readers. Dynamic equivalence as a translation principle, on the other hand, is used in varying degrees by all versions of the Bible.12 This is easily illustrated by a few examples, several of which were given to me about 1990 by former Old Testament professor (Calvin Theological Seminary) Dr. Marten Woudstra (now deceased). • A literal rendering of the opening part of the Hebrew text of Isaiah 40:2 would read, “Speak to the heart of Jerusalem.” Yet all English versions (including the KJV) see the need for a dynamic-equivalence translation here (e.g., the NIV has “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem”). • In Jeremiah 2:2 the KJV and the NASB read “in the ears of Jerusalem,” but the NKJV and the NIV have “in the hearing of Jerusalem.” Here the NKJV is just as “dynamic” as the NIV. That it did not have to be is clear from the NASB. Yet the translators wanted to communicate the meaning in a natural way to modern readers, which is precisely what the NIV also wanted to do. • In Haggai 2:16 the NASB has “grain heap,” but the KJV, NKJV, and NIV all use “heap” alone (which is all the Hebrew has). Here the formalequivalent version, the NASB, is freer than the NIV. • The KJV and the NKJV read “no power at all” in John 19:11, whereas the NIV has only “no power” (in accord with the Greek). Which version is following the formal-equivalence approach here, and which ones are following the dynamic approach? One could continue ad infinitum with this kind of illustration. Suffice it to mention additionally that there is a book of over two hundred pages published as a glossary to the oddities of the KJV word use and diction.13 In a similar vein, Ron Youngblood has written the following:

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The Challenge of Bible Translation To render the Greek word sarx by “flesh” virtually every time it appears does not require the services of a translator; all one needs is a dictionary (or, better yet, a computer). But to recognize that sarx has differing connotations in different contexts, that in addition to “flesh” it often means “human standards” or “earthly descent” or “sinful nature” or “sexual impulse” or “person,” etc., and therefore to translate sarx in a variety of ways is to understand that translation is not only a mechanical, word-forword process but also a nuanced [I would have said contextually nuanced], thought-for-thought procedure. Translation, as any expert in the field will readily admit, is just as much an art as it is a science. Word-for-word translations typically demonstrate great respect for the source language . . . but often pay only lip service to the requirements of the target language. . . . When translators of Scripture insist on reproducing every lexical and grammatical element in their English renderings, the results are often grotesque.14

Because I have served on the executive committee of the NIV’s Committee on Bible Translation (CBT) since 1975 and have been the chief spokesperson for the NIV, people often ask me, “What kind of translation, then, is the NIV? Where does it fit among all the others?” While these related questions have been dealt with generally in several publications and reviews, they are addressed specifically in only one published authoritative source dating back to the release of the complete NIV in 1978: Broadly speaking, there are several methods of translation: the concordant one, which ranges from literalism to the comparative freedom of the King James Version and even more of the Revised Standard Version, both of which follow the syntactical structure of the Hebrew and Greek texts as far as is compatible with good English; the paraphrastic one, in which the translator restates the gist of the text in his own words; and the method of equivalence, in which the translator seeks to understand as fully as possible what the biblical writers had to say (a criterion common, of course, to the careful use of any method) and then tries to find its closest equivalent in contemporary usage. In its more advanced form this is spoken of as dynamic equivalence, in which the translator seeks to express the meaning as the biblical writers would if they were writing in English today. All these methods have their values when responsibly used.

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As for the NIV, its method is an eclectic one with the emphasis for the most part on a flexible use of concordance and equivalence, but with a minimum of literalism, paraphrase, or outright dynamic equivalence. In other words, the NIV stands on middle ground—by no means the easiest position to occupy. It may fairly be said that the translators were convinced that, through long patience in seeking the right words, it is possible to attain a high degree of faithfulness in putting into clear and idiomatic English what the Hebrew and Greek texts say. Whatever literary distinction the NIV has is the result of the persistence with which this course was pursued.15 The CBT has also formulated certain guidelines in an unpublished document (“Translators’ Manual,” dated 29 November 1968): 1. At every point the translation shall be faithful to the Word of God as represented by the most accurate text of the original languages of Scripture. 2. The work shall not be a revision of another version but a fresh translation from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. 3. The translation shall reflect clearly the unity and harmony of the Spiritinspired writings. 4. The aim shall be to make the translation represent as clearly as possible only what the original says, and not to inject additional elements by unwarranted paraphrasing. 5. The translation shall be designed to communicate the truth of God’s revelation as effectively as possible to English readers in the language of the people. In this respect the Committee’s goal is that of doing for our own times what the King James Version did for its day. 6. Every effort shall be made to achieve good English style. 7. The finished product shall be suitable for use in public worship, in the study of the Word, and in devotional reading. The following statements appear later in this same document: 1. Translators should keep the principles of the translation constantly in mind and strive for accuracy, clarity, and force of expression. 2. Translators should do their work originally from the original language, but before the completion of their work representative translations and commentaries shall be consulted. 3. Certain notes of text variation, alternative translation, cross reference, or explanation will be put in the margin.

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The Challenge of Bible Translation 4. The purpose of the project is not to prepare a word-for-word translation nor yet a paraphrase. 5. Read the passages as a whole and aloud to check for euphony and suitability for public reading. At the time of the NIV’s publication I wrote this about the translation work: About two thousand years ago, when confronted with the prospect of translating Plato’s Protagoras into Latin, Cicero declared, “It is hard to preserve in a translation the charm of expressions which in another language are most felicitous. . . . If I render word for word, the result will sound uncouth, and if compelled by necessity I alter anything in the order or wording, I shall seem to have departed from the function of a translator.” Such is the dilemma of all translators! And the problem is particularly acute for those who attempt to translate the Bible, for it is the eternal Word of God. The goal, of course, is to be as faithful as possible in all renderings. But faithfulness is a doubleedged sword, for true faithfulness in translation means being faithful not only to the original language but also to the “target” or “receptor” language. That is precisely what we attempted to produce in the New International Version—just the right balance between accuracy and the best contemporary idiom.16

In spite of that goal, I am certain that from time to time we will continue to be criticized—by some for being literal but not contemporary enough, and by others for being contemporary but not literal enough. Yet perhaps that fact in itself will indicate that we have basically succeeded. All this clearly indicates that the CBT attempted to make the NIV a balanced, mediating version—one that would fall about halfway between the most literal and the most free. But is that, in fact, where the NIV fits? Many neutral parties believe so. For example, Steven Sheeley and Robert Nash state, “The NIV committees attempted to walk this fine line and, to their credit, usually achieved a good sense of balance between fidelity to the ancient texts and sensitivity to modern expression.” They conclude, “Like any other modern translation of the Bible, the NIV should not be considered the only true translation. Its great achievement, though, lies in its readability. No other modern English translation has reached the same level and still maintained such a close connection to the ancient languages.”17 A similar opinion is expressed in the “Report to General Synod Abbotsford 1995” by the Committee on Bible Translations appointed by General Synod Lin-

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coln 1992 of the Canadian Reformed Churches. The members of the committee (P. Aasman, J. Geertsema, W. Smouter, C. Van Dam, and G. H. Visscher) thoroughly and carefully investigated the NASB, the NKJV, and the NIV. They indicated that the NIV “attempted to strike a balance between a high degree of faithfulness to the text and clarity for the receptor in the best possible English.” They added that “it was frequently our experience that very often when our initial reaction to an NIV translation was negative, further study and investigation convinced us that the NIV translators had taken into account all the factors involved and had actually rendered the best possible translation of the three versions.”18 Similarly, when the committee questioned a passage as being too interpretive, upon closer examination it was often discovered that the NIV had produced a text that was accurate yet idiomatic.19 They concluded that “the NIV is more idiomatic than the NASB and NKJV but at the same time as accurate as the NASB and NKJV.”20 (By the way, the General Synod Abbotsford 1995 of the Canadian Reformed Churches adopted these two recommendations—among others: [1] to continue to recommend the NIV for use in the churches, and [2] to continue to leave it in the freedom of the churches if they feel compelled to use other translations that received favorable reviews in the reports.) Another neutral voice is that of Terry White in an article about how a Baptist General Conference church (Wooddale in Eden Prairie, Minnesota) endorsed the NIV as the best translation for their membership. The church appointed a task force to evaluate the NIV, the RSV, the NASB, and the NKJV. The NIV came out ahead in nine of ten areas evaluated (most readable, best scholarship used, best grammatically, best paragraphing, best concordances and supplemental writing, best for use by laity, best Old Testament, best New Testament, and best total Bible). A slight edge was given to the NASB as the most accurate rendering of the original texts. Nonetheless it was clear that the NIV had the best overall balance.21 Strictly speaking, then, the NIV is not a dynamic-equivalence translation. If it were, it would read “snakes will no longer be dangerous” (GNB) instead of “dust will be the serpent’s food” (Isa 65:25). Or it would read in 1 Samuel 20:30 “You bastard!” (GNB) instead of “You son of a perverse and rebellious woman!” Similar illustrations could be multiplied to demonstrate that the NIV is an idiomatically balanced translation. How was such a balance achieved? By having a built-in system of checks and balances. We called it the A–B–C–Ds of the NIV, using those letters as an alphabetic acrostic to represent accuracy, beauty, clarity, and dignity. We wanted to be accurate, that is, as faithful to the original text as possible (see our comments on the rendering of Genesis 1:1 at the beginning of this chapter). But it was

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important to be equally faithful to the target or receptor language—English in this case. So we did not want to make the mistake—in the name of accuracy— of creating “translation English” that would not be beautiful and natural. Accuracy, then, must be balanced by beauty of language. The CBT attempted to make the NIV read and flow the way any great English literature should. Calvin D. Linton (professor emeritus of English at George Washington University) has praised the beauty of the NIV as literature: The NIV is filled with sensitive renderings of rhythms, from the exultant beat of the Song of Deborah and Barak (Judg 5:1– 31) to the “dying fall” of the rhythms of the world-weary Teacher in Ecclesiastes, with myriad effects in between. As a random sample, let the reader speak the following lines from Job (29:2–3), being careful to give full value to the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables: How I long for the months gone by, for the days when God watched over me, when his lamp shone upon my head and by his light I walked through darkness! It is better than the KJV!22 At the same time we did not want to make the mistake—in the name of beauty—of creating lofty, flowery English that would not be clear. So beauty must be balanced by clarity: “When a high percentage of people misunderstand a rendering, it cannot be regarded as a legitimate translation.”23 If a translation is to be both accurate and clear (idiomatic), it cannot be a mechanical exercise; instead, it must be a highly nuanced process. Popular columnist Godfrey Smith wrote in The Sunday Times (London, England): I was won over by the way the new Bible [the NIV] handles Paul’s magnificent [First] Epistle to the Corinthians [13:4]. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” So runs the old version [the KJV], but the word charity is a real showstopper. The new version puts it with admirable simplicity: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.” The old thunder has been lost, but the gain in sense is enormous.24 My favorite illustration of lack of clarity is the KJV rendering of Job 36:33: “The noise thereof sheweth concerning it, the cattle also concerning the vapour.” In the interest of clarity the NIV reads, “His [God’s] thunder announces the coming storm; even the cattle make known its approach.” Or consider the Lord’s

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description of the leviathan in Job 41:12–14 (KJV): “I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion. Who can discover the face of his garment? or who can come to him with his double bridle? Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about.” Again, in order to communicate clearly in contemporary English idiom, the NIV translates as follows: I will not fail to speak of his limbs, his strength and his graceful form. Who can strip off his outer coat? Who would approach him with a bridle? Who dares open the doors of his mouth, ringed about with his fearsome teeth? The importance of clarity in Bible translations is obvious. Yet, the CBT did not want to make the mistake—in the name of clarity—of stooping to slang, vulgarisms, street vernacular, and unnecessarily undignified language. Clarity, then, must be balanced by dignity, particularly since one of our objectives was to produce a general, all-church-use Bible. Some of the dynamic-equivalence versions are at times unnecessarily undignified, as illustrated above in 1 Samuel 20:30. Additional examples could be given. But the point is that when we produced the NIV, we wanted accuracy, but not at the expense of beauty; we wanted beauty, but not at the expense of clarity; and we wanted clarity, but not at the expense of dignity. We wanted all these in a nice balance. Did we succeed? Rather than be restricted to using descriptive terms like formal equivalence, dynamic equivalence, paraphrase, and the like, in answering this question, it may be more helpful to note the distinctions John Callow and John Beekman make between four types of translations: highly literal, modified literal, idiomatic, and unduly free. Their view can be diagrammed like this:25

Unacceptable

Acceptable

Unacceptable

highly literal

modified literal idiomatic

unduly free

In their classification system the NIV, in my opinion, contains primarily modified literal and idiomatic renderings, though with a greater number of idiomatic ones. To sum up, there is a need for a new category in classifying translations— a classification I’d call a mediating position. What, then, makes a good Bible translation? In my opinion, a good translation will follow a balanced or mediating translation philosophy. Donald Burdick puts it this way:

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The Challenge of Bible Translation A good translation is neither too much nor too little. It is neither too slavish a reproduction of the Greek [and Hebrew], nor is it too free in its handling of the original. It is neither too modern and casual, nor is it too stilted and formal. It is not too much like the KJV, nor does it depart too far from the time-honored beauty and dignity of that seventeenth-century classic. In short, the best translation is one that has avoided the extremes and has achieved instead the balance that will appeal to the most people for the longest period of time.26

An appropriate conclusion to this chapter is provided by Bible translation specialist Bruce Metzger: Translating the Bible is a never-ending task. As long as English remains a living language it will continue to change, and therefore new renderings of the Scriptures will be needed. Furthermore, as other, and perhaps still more, ancient manuscripts come to light, scholars will need to evaluate the history of the scribal transmission of the original texts. And let it be said, finally, alongside such developments in translating the Bible there always remains the duty of all believers to translate the teaching of Holy Writ into their personal lives.27 NOTES 1. This chapter is adapted from a similar one in Kenneth L. Barker, The Balance of the NIV: What Makes a Good Translation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 41–55, 112–14. Appreciation is hereby expressed to the publisher for permission to use some of that material. I take great pleasure in presenting this chapter in honor of my dear friend and esteemed colleague, Dr. Ronald Youngblood, on the occasion of his retirement at age seventy. Ron and I have known each other since 1959. I have appreciated his valuable contributions to the New International Version (NIV), The NIV Study Bible, and the New International Reader’s Version (NIrV)—all of them being projects I’ve had the enjoyable privilege of working on with him. God be praised! 2. Moisés Silva, God, Language, and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 134. 3. Daniel Taylor, “Confessions of a Bible Translator,” Books & Culture (November/December 1995), 17. 4. Bob Sheehan, Which Version Now? (Sussex: Carey Publications, n.d.), 21. 5. Kenneth L. Barker, The Accuracy of the NIV (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 16–17. 6. Silva, God, Language, and Scripture, 134. 7. E. A. Speiser, Genesis, Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), lxiii–lxiv. 8. Ibid., lxvi; see also Herbert M. Wolf, “Literal versus Accurate,” in The Making of the NIV, ed. Kenneth L. Barker (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 125–34, 165.

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9. Eugene A. Nida, Toward a Science of Translating (Leiden: Brill, 1964), 159–60. 10. Edward L. Greenstein, “Theories of Modern Translation,” Prooftexts 3 (1983): 9–39; quoted by J. T. Barrera, The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible, trans. W. G. E. Watson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998): 126. 11. R. Elliott, “Bible Translation,” in Origin of the Bible, ed. Philip W. Comfort (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1992), 233. 12. See Cecil Hargreaves, A Translator’s Freedom (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993). 13. Melvin E. Elliott, The Language of the King James Bible: A Glossary Explaining Its Words and Expressions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967); see also Edwin H. Palmer, “The KJV and the NIV,” in The Making of the NIV, 140–54, 165. 14. Ronald Youngblood, “The New International Version was published in 1978— this is the story of why, and how,” The Standard (November 1988): 18. For an example of such a “grotesque” rendering, see Bob Sheehan, Which Version Now? 19 (this latter work is available from International Bible Society in Colorado Springs, Colorado). 15. The Story of the New International Version (New York: The New York International Bible Society, 1978), 13 (italics mine). 16. Kenneth L. Barker, “An Insider Talks about the NIV,” Kindred Spirit (Fall 1978): 7. 17. Steven M. Sheeley and Robert N. Nash Jr., The Bible in English Translation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), 44, 46. 18. “Report to General Synod Abbotsford 1995” from the Committee on Bible Translations appointed by Synod Lincoln 1992 of the Canadian Reformed Churches, 16. 19. See “Report to General Synod Abbotsford 1995,” 169. 20. “Report to General Synod Abbotsford 1995,” 63. 21. See Terry White, “The Best Bible Version for Our Generation,” The Standard (November 1988): 12–14. 22. Calvin D. Linton, “The Importance of Literary Style,” in The Making of the NIV, 30. 23. Eugene A. Nida and Charles R. Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 2. 24. Quoted in A Bible for Today and Tomorrow (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), 19. 25. John Callow and John Beekman, Translating the Word of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), 23–24. 26. Donald W. Burdick, “At the Translator’s Table,” The [Cincinnati Christian] Seminary Review 21 (March 1975): 44. 27. Bruce M. Metzger, “Handing Down the Bible Through the Ages: The Role of Scribe and Translator,” Reformed Review 43 (Spring 1990): 170.

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3 The Limits of F u n c t i o n a l E q u i va l e n c e i n B i b l e T r a n s l at i o n — and Other Limits, Too D. A. Carson

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eventeen years ago I wrote an essay with a similar title: “The Limits of Dynamic Equivalence in Bible Translation.”1 At the time, the expression “dynamic equivalence” was still being used, though even then it was being superseded by “functional equivalence,” which, doubtless, is a better label for the translation theory to which both expressions refer. The article was reprinted in various places2 and (I am told) has served students in many courses on translation in several parts of the world. At the suggestion of the editors of this Festschrift, and with the permission of the journal in which the essay first appeared, I shall in this essay incorporate most of what I said seventeen years ago but cast it in rather different terms, and in any case bring some of the discussion up-to-date.

THE CHANGED CLIMATE OF DISCUSSION The earlier draft was written at a time when the triumph of functional equivalence was largely applauded, even taken for granted in many circles. By and large, I concurred that the theory was fundamentally right and certainly useful. My essay was a modest attempt to offer a handful of warnings against abuses of the theory.3 The most competent translators needed no guidance from me, of course, but some practitioners, picking up on some facets of the theory, were making decisions not demanded by the theory—decisions laden with problems that needed to be addressed. So when I spoke of the “limits” of functional (or dynamic) equivalence, I was not calling into question the significant gains that the theory had brought to Bible translators all around the world, but I was 65

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merely trying to curb some of the less informed enthusiasm with a modicum of critical reserve. Today, however, the climate of discussion has changed—rather differently, perhaps, in two groups: on the one hand, professional translators, and on the other, ordinary Christians who, after all, support Bible translation, directly or indirectly. The changes in the climate may usefully be summarized in three observations, namely, developments in translation theory, the rise of linguistic conservatism, and the debate over gender-inclusive language.

DEVELOPMENTS IN TRANSLATION THEORY Translation theory has continued to develop. One of the standard works for Bible translators a quarter of a century ago,4 for instance, was substantially eclipsed just over a decade later by the volume that became the “bible” of functional-equivalence theory.5 Since then there have been dramatic developments in diverse contributing fields—sociolinguistics,6 relevance theory,7 text linguistics (discourse analysis),8 the application of various elements of linguistic theory to the Greek and Hebrew,9 and the bearing of narrative criticism on translation technique,10 to mention but a few.11 Almost no one pretends that Bible translation can be reduced to an exact science; almost all vocational Bible translators are eclectic in their appeal to various linguistic developments, not in arbitrary ways, but in ways that recognize the complexities of the challenge and that appreciate the varied contributions on offer. As a result, the vast majority of experienced vocational Bible translators, at least in my experience in various parts of the so-called Third World, are remarkably sophisticated about their business. What this means in practice is that they are not naive about the strengths and weaknesses of any translation theory. Even if they have not formulated such matters themselves, their actual experience in the work of translation and their exposure to complementary—and even competing—theories tend to make them attentive to problems. Nevertheless, it is true to say that functional-equivalence theory has a dominant place in the thinking of Bible translators around the world, especially those who work in receptor languages remarkably different from either the Indo-European or Semitic languages in which most people in the West have been nurtured.

THE RISE OF LINGUISTIC CONSERVATISM While these trends have been going on apace, in the last few years a linguistically conservative reaction has taken root in some circles deeply interested in interpreting the Bible accurately, though relatively few of the voices on this

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front are vocational translators. The common thesis in these contributions is that many modern English translations—I say English, because almost all the protests of which I’m aware have to do with English translations of the Bible, with very little awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of translations into other languages (strengths and weaknesses, by the way, that often shed light on the challenges of translation)—have become too sloppy, too paraphrastic, too inaccurate. What is needed, it is argued, is more “literal” translation (many linguists would prefer to speak of more “direct” translation). The observations these critics make vary in quality. Ironically, however, the best points they offer have already been made by exponents of functional equivalence themselves.12 These exponents are for the most part acutely aware of the dangers of functional-equivalence theory and hoist their own flags of warning; but they are also acutely aware of the dangers of more direct translation. The linguistically conservative critics of functional equivalence, however, cite the dangers as though they were insuperable objections to the theory (rather than features of which the functional-equivalence theorists are thoroughly aware), while not, on the whole, treating evenhandedly the plethora of problems associated with more direct translation—problems that helped call functional equivalence theory into being.13 And in some cases, it must be said, the objections advanced by those critics who prefer more direct translation are linguistically naive. Consider, for example, a recent essay by Raymond C. Van Leeuwen.14 Van Leeuwen excoriates many modern English translations, including the NLT, the NIV, the NRSV, the REB, and the TEV, and the functional equivalence that ostensibly lies beneath them.15 Yet almost all the issues he raises have been discussed at length by defenders of functional equivalence, sometimes to make the same points. Moreover, it is not long before Van Leeuwen himself makes telling admissions: “Yet translation is a difficult and, in some ways, impossible task. Translations always compromise and interpret. . . . A translator’s first and most important job is to bridge the language gap. She seeks the best way of saying in English what was said first in Hebrew or Greek. But even this is not simple. No English word fully matches a Greek or Hebrew word.”16 How true. But if these points had been borne in mind in the earlier part of the essay, it would have been difficult for Van Leeuwen to maintain his stance on the translation of various expressions with such unflinching firmness. To come to examples: FE [functional-equivalence] translations (again, most Bibles today) often change the language, images, and metaphors of Scripture to make understanding easier. But for serious study,

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The Challenge of Bible Translation readers need a translation that is more transparent to the “otherness” of Scripture. We need a translation that allows the Bible to say what it says, even if that seems strange and odd to readers at first glance. If God is “other” than we are, we should be willing to work at the “otherness” of the Bible, in order to understand what the Lord is saying through his Word. The purpose of the Bible is not to make Jesus like us, but to make us like Christ. The Bible is designed to change us, to make us different, heirs of Abraham according to the promise fulfilled in Christ (Acts 2). We need translations for people who are eager and willing to make the effort to overcome the difficulty of reading a book that is in fact foreign to us. Indeed, when we come to serious Bible study, whether in a church group, Sunday school, or college classroom, this type of translation becomes necessary, for we are trying to get as close as possible within the limits of our own language. . . . The danger of FE translations is that they shape the Bible too much to fit our world and our expectations. There is a danger that the Bible gets silenced because we have tamed and domesticated it.17

In the right context, much of this is well said. Indeed, I said similar things in my earlier essay on dynamic equivalence and shall say them again below. But I say them within the context of acknowledging converse dangers that Van Leeuwen does not recognize. For a start, Van Leeuwen confuses the “foreignness” of any text written in a “foreign” language with the “otherness” of God. This then becomes a tool to justify preserving more direct translations as a function of preserving foreignness and thus the otherness of God. But the question that must always be asked is whether the original text sounded “foreign” to the first readers and hearers. In other words, is the “otherness” of God and thus the “foreignness” of the Bible’s message concretized in the foreignness of the language itself? In some cases, that may be so (e.g., some forms of apocalyptic); in some cases, the language may be syntactically smooth and contemporary to the first readers but of difficult vocabulary (e.g., a few parts of Paul); in still other cases, the text may be linguistically contemporary with the first readers but essentially alien and even offensive in its content. These variations cannot all be preserved by the mere expedient of opting for a more direct form of translation. In fact, the more direct form of translation may draw attention to the foreignness of the original language to the modern reader (though it was not foreign to the first readers) and thus actually distract the reader from the

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far more important “otherness” of God. In short, what sounds like high theological motivation becomes a blunt instrument that fails to recognize the subtleties of translation. One thinks, by analogy, of the brilliant recent translation of Beowulf by Seamus Heaney.18 Within the constraints of terms and idioms that simply must be preserved, Heaney manages to bring to life an astonishingly “contemporary” translation that nevertheless pulsates with the life of ancient Scandinavian mythological heroes. Moreover, Van Leeuwen does not at this point mention the opposing danger. Sometimes in the name of preserving more formally direct translation, linguistic conservatives are in fact merely preferring traditional expressions that sound natural to them—and are thus preferred because they are well-known to them. But that doesn’t mean they are necessarily the best forms for new generations of readers who are both biblically illiterate and less attuned to more archaic forms of English expression. The appeal to preserve the “foreignness” of Scripture, though it can be related in some instances to preserving the Bible’s distinctive outlook and God’s “otherness,” may be an appeal to preserve the inside-track traditional language that Christians love and to which they feel loyal. But none of this balancing challenge is introduced. Translators have long talked about three criteria in translation: accuracy, naturalness, and clarity. These criteria bear on translation principles, linguistics, presuppositions, theology, communication theory, exegesis, and the like. But all of these criteria are tricky. In particular, “naturalness” is a desirable goal insofar as the original text is “natural” (linguistically?) to the first readers. Because the structures of two languages may be very different, however, a more direct translation, formally closely allied with the source language, may introduce an element of “unnaturalness” in the receptor language. One may better preserve naturalness, on occasion, by a less direct translation. On the other hand, where the original text is anything but “natural” to the original reader, owing perhaps to its message or to its vocabulary, then ideally the receptor language should convey the same degree of unnaturalness, and for similar reasons. That can be trickier than one might think. For instance, some of the parables of Jesus, though linguistically fairly simple, were doubtless stunningly shocking to the first hearers and readers. It is difficult to imagine that they could retain such shock value to regular Bible readers today, precisely because we are so familiar with them (at least at some superficial level). It appears, then, that Van Leeuwen’s appeal is ducking some complex questions in defense of a linguistically conservative platform. The issue becomes even more tricky when one considers a fourth translation criterion that has been discussed in recent years, namely, perceived authenticity.19 This

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perceived authenticity is on the part of the intended audience, which may entertain a slightly different set of assumptions than the translators themselves. Moreover, initial readers may operate with a different set of assumptions from those of long-term, well-informed Bible readers. Inevitably good translation involves some compromise among the four basic criteria. Where one criterion takes over absolutely, however, other things are soon lost. It is perfectly acceptable to argue that one of the criteria has been shortchanged (e.g., accuracy), but informed comment will surely not wish to ignore equally sophisticated discussion of the other three. As one very sophisticated linguist wryly said after reading his way into this debate, perhaps one of the reasons that impel some people to lay more stress on accuracy (by which they usually mean a greater tilting to more direct translation, though in all fairness accuracy is a more complicated matter than that) is that what they really want is not so much a better translation as a “crib” on the original languages. Under the banner of “other examples of FE translations’ obscuring the text,”20 Van Leeuwen writes, “Similarly, Paul often refers to the ‘pistis of Christ.’ Pistis means ‘faithfulness’ or ‘faith.’ Was Paul saying here that we are saved by our ‘faith in Christ’ or that ‘the faithfulness of Christ’ in his life and death saves sinners? When translations decide questions like this for us, they may prevent us from a Spirit-led, fuller understanding of God’s Word.”21 But this is positively cranky; it has nothing whatsoever to do with functional-equivalence theory or otherwise (as a perusal of more direct translations quickly discloses). English has no word that means both faith and faithfulness. The limitations of our language mean that we must choose, and with the choice of the word comes the choice of how to take the genitive of the person. We may, if we wish, include a footnote to provide the alternative. But translators have to make judgment calls on which passages are so doubtful that an alternative in a footnote is called for—and in this instance I know teams of translators on both sides of this issue who are convinced that the alternative is not worth including! In any case, this has nothing whatsoever to do with functional equivalence. Consider another of Van Leeuwen’s discussions: It is hard to know what the Bible means when we are uncertain about what it says. In class, teachers with Greek and Hebrew often find themselves retranslating a passage to show students more directly what the literal [sic!] Hebrew and Greek said. The problem with FE translations (i.e., most modern translations) is that they prevent the reader from inferring biblical meaning because they change what the Bible said.22

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The example that Van Leeuwen deploys at this point is Colossians 3:9–10, which he quotes from the KJV: “Ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man.”23 “The KJV,” he writes, “at this point offers a transparent or direct translation of the Greek.” He then adds parenthetically, “I prefer not to call it ‘literal’ because translations always add, change, and subtract from the original. The only literal Bible is written in Hebrew and Greek.”24 I doubt if literal is the best word by which to refer to source languages, but I note that in the block quote above, Van Leeuwen says he is pursuing the literal Hebrew and Greek in the translation. Terminology aside, however, Van Leeuwen goes on to say that the paired expressions “the old man . . . the new man” “are simple and clear, like the Greek. What Paul said here is plain. What he meant is not, at least to most readers.”25 Van Leeuwen argues that this does not mean what the NIV says: “You have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self.” Such an expression may unwittingly lead the unwary away from what Paul meant (namely, “from Christ”) to modern individualistic notions of the “self,” which is surely “one of America’s greatest idols.”26 Van Leeuwen points out, rightly, that the original is tied up with what Paul means by being “in Adam” and being “in Christ.” Thus “the old man” doubtless refers to Adam, the first man, while “the new man” refers to Christ, the last Adam, the true “image of God” (cf. Col 1:15; Rom 5:12–21; 1 Cor 15:45– 50; Eph 4:22–23). All of this, I think, is exegetically responsible. Then Van Leeuwen concludes, “Today it might be better to translate the phrases as ‘the old Adam . . . the new Adam,’ to show that Paul preaches Christ in Old Testament terms.”27 I think this is an admirable suggestion. But it is not “direct” translation; it is, precisely, the fruit of functional-equivalence theory. Van Leeuwen’s suggestion is most definitely not a matter of preserving what the Greek says so that the contemporary reader can properly infer what the Greek means. Rather, Van Leeuwen has interpreted the Greek every bit as much as the NIV translators have interpreted the Greek. In this case, I think his interpretation better reflects the original meaning. But “the old Adam . . . the new Adam” is not what the original text says, even if it nicely catches what the original text means. Van Leeuwen’s own example, then, serves only to justify functional-equivalence theory, all his strictures and protestations notwithstanding. Or consider two brief essays by Tony Payne, both written to promote the recent ESV over against the NIV, the former now being distributed in Australia by Matthias Media, with which Payne is affiliated.28 The kinds of points he makes have often been made by those who defend functional equivalence (and

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I will clarify some of them below). Unfortunately, however, not only is his selection lacking evenhandedness, but his argumentation sometimes betrays linguistic and even (in one particular) theological naïveté. Payne criticizes the NIV in four areas, in each of which he finds the ESV superior: 1. The NIV breaks up long Greek and Hebrew sentences into shorter, simpler sentences. The price that is paid, Payne says, is the loss of a lot of connective words (such as “for,” “but,” “therefore,” etc.), whose absence makes the flow much less clear. Similarly, the NIV often renders participial clauses as new sentences. The gain is found in punchier English; the price is in the loss of the logical cohesion, so that it actually becomes harder to follow the thought of the original. To lose the “for” at the beginning of Romans 1:18 is to lose the connection with verses 16–17. There is truth in what Payne is saying. Nevertheless, the issue is somewhat more complicated. For a start, Greek often resorts to long sentences, Hebrew much less frequently: though he mentions both languages, Payne’s strictures, insofar as they carry weight, apply only to the Greek. More important, stylish Greek loves not only long sentences but endless embedded subordination (i.e., hypotaxis); by contrast, contemporary English loves shorter sentences and parataxis.29 The implication is that good translation, which tries to be as natural as is the source, must transform syntactical subordination into coordination— always assuming, of course, that one is not losing too much of something else of value. That is why translation always involves judgment calls and why focusing on only one criterion will always produce a poor translation. Similarly, Greek loves to include a substantial array of particles (Attic Greek, of course, even more so than the Koiné); good English style tries to minimize them. Where English translations try to preserve most of these (in more direct translations), a very high percentage of sentences begin with “And”—as in the KJV. That is one of the reasons why the Book of Mormon, which apes the language style of the KJV, sounds so phony to many modern ears. The logical connections that are carried by such particles are often carried, in English, by the flow of thought or by other discourse markers. Of course, in any particular instance, one may usefully argue that this or that translation does not have the balance quite right. On the whole, my own preference would be for the NIV to be a tad tighter here and there. But it is disingenuous to make too many sweeping statements, and this for at least two reasons. First, there is some variation regarding the force of such connectives in different New Testament writers, and often the meaning of a particle learned by a stu-

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dent (usually culled from a lexicon) is in many of its textual occurrences something far more subtle. One thinks, for instance of the fine recent work by Stephanie Black.30 To argue in such cases that one must render Greek particles by English particles is hopelessly naive. Second, precisely because particles are subtle things, one can always find instances where any particular translation has it wrong. In my view, the NIV’s “Yet” at the beginning of John 11:6 is indefensible. On the other hand, scarcely less defensible is the ESV’s rendering of 1 Corinthians 1:30: “ . . . Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption”—as though Christ Jesus is “made” all four of these things in this context. The Greek’s Christom Ie msou hos egene mthem sophia he m m in apo theou, dikaiosunem te kai hagiasmos kai apolutromsis is better preserved in the NIV’s “Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God— that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.” The flow of the context favors this rendering as well.31 2. Payne objects that, while the original text carried a number of possible meanings, the NIV removes the uncertainty by fastening on one of the possibilities. The advantage is clarity, but this “places the responsibility for interpretation into the hands of the translator rather than the reader.”32 For instance, in Romans 1:17 the NIV uses the expression “righteousness from God,” while the original, Payne asserts, is actually “righteousness of God,” which could refer either to the righteousness that comes from God or to the righteousness that belongs to God (i.e., “God’s righteousness”). Overspecification certainly is a problem in translation. This is probably the best of Payne’s four points. His grounding of it, however, is untenable. As noted above, he thinks that this practice places the responsibility for interpretation in the hands of translator rather than reader. Surely we are not to return to the astonishing naïveté that thought that translation could be done without interpretation? Consider, for example, the many languages that use either an exclusive “we” or an inclusive “we”—with no other alternative. That means that every time the Greek Testament uses a Greek form of “we,” which does not intrinsically specify whether or not the usage is inclusive or exclusive, translators into such languages must decide which way to render it—and of course this is unavoidable overspecifying.33 Because of the differences between languages, translation always involves some instances of overspecifying and underspecifying. And once again, there is a judgment call to be made. In my judgment, NIV overspecifies a bit too often; RSV/ESV leaves things unnecessarily ambiguous a bit too often, with resulting loss of clarity. But Payne mentions only the former. And the notion that one can translate responsibly without interpretation is, quite

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frankly, shockingly ignorant of the most basic challenges facing translators. Moreover, even in the example Payne cites (Rom 1:17), the Greek does not have, literally, “righteousness of God”; rather, it has dikaiosune m . . . theou, i.e., the genitive of the word rendered “God.” How to render this genitive is precisely the question. It is true to say that the English rendering “righteousness of God” preserves more ambiguity. But there are thousands of instances of the genitive in Scripture where Payne would agree that the context makes it abundantly clear that the genitive should not be rendered by an English “of . . .” phrase. Apparently the NIV translators thought this passage belonged to that set. One may criticize their judgment in this instance, of course, but not on the grounds Payne adduces. 3. Payne criticizes the NIV for translating one Hebrew or Greek word by a number of different English words, depending on the context. This, he says, is done to produce more stylish, flowing English, but one loses the connections that a reader of the original will be able to make. For instance, Paul says that Jesus was descended from David “according to the flesh”—and flesh is an important word in Romans that gets hidden in its first occurrence when it is rendered “human nature” in the NIV, and elsewhere in Romans “sinful nature.” Payne comments, “Again, these translations are defensible in themselves, but they remove the connection between the ideas. They don’t allow the reader to build up an idea of what Paul means by ‘flesh’.”34 There are two major misconceptions in these judgments, apart from the difficulty of rendering the Greek word sarx. The first is that for Payne’s argument to work, the word in the receptor language must have exactly the same semantic range as the word in the source language—and as has repeatedly been shown, this is rarely the case. That is why all translations use a variety of words to render one source word, or one word in the receptor language to render several words in the source language.35 One can argue about whether any translation has got the balance of things right: Has the pursuit of smooth idiom in the receptor language introduced a higher percentage of different words in the receptor language than is strictly necessary? What is “strictly necessary”? Different translators will judge this matter differently. But Payne’s sweeping judgments on this point are linguistically indefensible. Second, they become even worse when he says that the translations he is condemning “don’t allow the reader to build up [emphasis mine] an idea of what Paul means by ‘flesh.’” This, of course, is to smuggle in “illegitimate totality transfer” through the back door, and that is inexcusable.36 The board decided to board up the old boat with a piece of board, while the passengers climbed on board. Supposing those four uses were scattered through half a dozen pages of some writing or other, would it be useful or helpful to speak of “building up” an idea of what the author means by “board”?

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I do not think that the NIV always renders sarx in the best way. But it is an extraordinarily difficult word. Here’s another author who takes the NIV to task over the same word: Unfortunately, the translators of the NIV had a proclivity for settling exegetical questions in their translations, thereby becoming interpreters rather than translators. Among their most serious blunders resulting from this practice was the decision to translate the Greek word sarx (“flesh”) by the theological prejudicial phrase “sinful nature.” This is unfortunate, I say, because this obvious interpretive bias is wrong. The specialized use of the word flesh refers neither to man’s sinful nature nor to the sinful self that he developed, but to the sinful body (as Paul calls it in Romans 6:6). When Paul speaks of the body as sinful, he does not conceive of the body as originally created by God as sinful . . . , but rather the body plunged into sinful practices and habits as the result of Adam’s fall.37 Here again the NIV translators are being condemned for being interpreters rather than translators (!), but the “obvious” meaning they missed is one that Jay Adams thinks is correct but almost no one else does.38 The kindest thing that can be said is that the language condemning the translators of a great breach of principle, instead of a different understanding of the text from that of the critic, is intemperate. But certain expressions are widely recognized as highly disputed and difficult (see the essay by Douglas J. Moo on “flesh” in this collection), and should breed a gracious humility rather than a condemnation of translators. One more example may help to clarify things. In Ephesians 2:11 Paul speaks of (literally) “Gentiles in the flesh.” The NIV renders this “Gentiles by birth.” On any meaning, “Gentiles in the flesh” is not an English locution; moreover, I doubt that many would be bold enough to argue that this means “Gentiles in the body” or “Gentiles in the old nature” or “Gentiles in the old era,” or any of the other specialized meanings that sarx is alleged to have in other contexts. The NIV has the meaning of the entire expression right, even though it loses the word “flesh,” and even though Greek sarx never means “birth.” The RSV/ESV preserves “Gentiles in the flesh,” but even though this is a more “direct” translation, I doubt that it preserves greater accuracy than the NIV. It certainly does not contribute to a Pauline total notion of sarx (illegitimate totality transfer). And it loses the naturalness of the NIV rendering. 4. Payne accuses the NIV of replacing concrete biblical expressions or metaphors with more abstract equivalents. The example he provides is this: The Bible often

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tells us to “walk in love” or “walk as children of light,” or not to “walk in darkness” or the like, and the NIV frequently renders such expressions by the more abstract “live a life of love” or “live as children of light” or the like. “‘Walk’ is not a hard English word to understand,” writes Payne, “nor is the metaphor a difficult one to grasp. Yet in changing it, the NIV removes some of the power of the word’s imagery.”39 In this particular case, I’m inclined to agree with Payne—though I confess I’m not quite certain whether or not my ease over this idiomatic use of the verb “to walk” is a reflection of my own familiarity with scriptural language rather than a fair reading of common usage in the contemporary culture. And I am not sure that the more direct rendering of “walk” is always the most helpful—e.g., ESV “let us also walk by the Spirit” (Gal 5:25), since “to walk by something/someone” in contemporary English has a rather different meaning than what Paul had in mind! The NIV’s “let us keep in step with the Spirit” preserves the metaphor, though it does not use the word “walk,” and is certainly more contemporary and less liable to be misunderstood than the RSV/ESV rendering. And these are merely two or three caveats in an instance where I am sympathetic to Payne’s criticism of the NIV’s rendering of a particular idiom! Yet somehow Payne has elevated an observation—probably a correct observation, though possibly stretched too far— into a generic criticism without evaluating a host of other metaphors where the NIV’s approach might earn it high marks. In short, Payne thinks the NIV philosophy of translation is this: “Better to have something simple, the NIV seems to think, even if it is not what the original text actually says.”40 Wait a minute: this form of argument is deceptive and manipulative, for anyone with a high view of Scripture will always want to side with “what the original text actually says.” But the original text does not actually say “flesh” and “walk” and the like; it says sarx and peripateom and the like, and the issue is how best to render such expressions. Payne’s assumption seems to be that the more direct translation is “what the original text actually says.” In fact, what the original text actually says is in Aramaic and Hebrew and Greek, and the dispute is over when the more direct translation is the better translation and when a functional equivalent is the better translation. To write “Better to have something simple, the NIV seems to think, even if it is not what the original text actually says” is to displace reasoned discussion about translation principles by manipulative rhetoric. It gets worse, and this is where the theological naïveté is introduced. After the sentence just quoted, Payne writes the following: This betrays something of a lack of trust, in my view, in what has traditionally been called the “perspicuity of Scripture”—

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that God’s word is clear and understandable for the person who reads it with a regenerate heart. Who are we, after all, to tinker with God’s words, just because we think we are doing God a favour in making them “easier”?41 Quite apart from the fact (once again!) that “God’s words” were in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek and that Payne presupposes that his preferred practice of more “direct” translation involves less tinkering with God’s words than any other approach—a claim sometimes true and sometimes patently false—this is a rather bad abuse of claritas Scripturae, the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture. That doctrine has an interesting and complex history.42 At the time of the Reformation, for instance, the issue turned on whether Scripture boasts an esoteric element that could only be unraveled by the inside knowledge or insight of the Magisterium. The Reformers insisted that it does not—that there is a clarity, a perspicuity, to Scripture itself, so that the special mediation of the Magisterium is by no means a criterion for understanding. All of this tied in very well with the Reformation insistence on the priesthood of all believers. But never, to my knowledge, was the doctrine used by responsible theologians to deny that some parts of Scripture are difficult to understand (see 2 Pet 3:16); still less has claritas Scripturae been used to defend a particular translation theory. Moreover, the way Payne has cast his argument it is difficult to see why we still need teachers in the church. Transparently, however, the New Testament documents insist on the role of teachers. This is not because they have some sort of inside track, some key to understanding, some special enduement of the Spirit unavailable to other believers. But they do have understanding, and some are more knowledgeable and insightful than others (otherwise, how shall we understand Galatians 2:11–14?). All things being equal (and they never are), those with a good grasp of Hebrew and Greek will grasp what Scripture says better than those without a good grasp of those languages. At no point does claritas Scripturae vitiate such distinctions. And at no point is it fair to accuse those who translate Scriptures, using a slightly different balance of translation theory, of jettisoning claritas Scripture. Such rhetoric is both uninformed and misdirected. The purpose of these observations is not to bad-mouth the ESV or to defend the NIV or TNIV against all comers. Translations have various strengths and weaknesses; further, they serve various constituencies. Clearly there are “better” and “worse” translations according to a particular set of criteria. Some translations may be fine for private reading but somehow seem less appropriate as pew Bibles. I shall return to this observation one more time after the next section. For the purpose of this essay, however, my point is that before talking about the limits of functional equivalence, it has become necessary to warn against the

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reactionary wing that demonizes functional equivalence with occasionally insightful rhetoric, but is more often linguistically uninformed, is rarely balanced, and is sometimes shrill.

THE DEBATE OVER GENDER-INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE The third change in the climate springs from debates on gender-related issues in Bible translation. The debates have become overheated and highly politicized, primarily, I think, not because many on the linguistically conservative side insist that those who disagree with them are wrong (after all, that is what debaters do, and each side thinks the other is wrong), but for two other reasons: (1) Many on this side insist that their opponents are not only wrong in their linguistic judgments but that they are compromising the truthfulness of Scripture, and inevitably that gets a lot more attention; and (2) the same people are organizing politically, inviting many high-profile evangelical leaders, whether or not they know anything at all about Greek, translation theory, or any language other than English, to sign on to the agenda. Entire denominations have been torn asunder in debate. In quieter moments, one wonders if any conceivable damage that could be done by the NIV or TNIV could be any worse than the division, bitterness, and strife stirred up by those who have made this a dividing issue. The history of the debate is now so well-known that it need not be repeated here. Moreover, some contributions from all sides have been thoughtful and informed and have advanced the discussion. From the linguistically conservative side, the volume by Vern S. Poythress and Wayne A. Grudem patiently explains its authors’ position and deserves careful reading43 —as do some of the most thoughtful reviews.44 On the other hand, those who are, theologically speaking, complementarians (such as Grudem and Poythress), but who are convinced on linguistic grounds that some revisions of contemporary English translations are mandated by changes in contemporary English, are well represented by Mark Strauss.45 This is not the place to rehash all the issues that have been raised. My purpose here is to mention a selection of translation issues that the gender-issue debate has put on the table. This is only a small sampling. I include them because they have in some measure changed public perceptions as to the legitimacy of functional equivalence, and so some of them should be aired again before turning, finally, to a review of the limitations of functional equivalence.

Various Approaches to Translation One of the themes of the book by Poythress and Grudem (to which reference has already been made) is that linguistics teaches us that texts carry not only

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large-scale meanings but countless fine “nuances” (one of their favorite words). In particular, of course, they are interested in the “nuances of meaning” that are lost, they aver, in inclusive translation. They speak of four different levels on which people approach translation:46 • The naive approach, adopted by the general public (at least the monolingual general public), which assumes that translation is nothing more than a matter of replacing words in one language with words in another language, ad seriatim. It assumes that the structures of language are identical and that the semantic ranges of both the source word and the receptor word are identical. Poythress and Grudem rightly assert that such a view of translation is simply wrong. • The theoretically informed approach, which displays a basic understanding of linguistics with respect to form and function. People working at this level will recognize, for instance, that one Hebrew word in Ezekiel 37 must variously be rendered “breath,” “wind,” and “Spirit” (37:5, 9, 14 respectively). And it is at this level, Poythress and Grudem assert, that their opponents in the gender-inclusive language debate are operating. • The discerning approach, which uses native speakers’ intuitive sense of the subtleties. Here, the native speaker would recognize the three different meanings of the Hebrew word in Ezekiel 37 but would also recognize the subtle interplays between them that a reader of a translation will miss. • The reflective approach, the fourth and highest level, which analyzes and makes explicit all the subtleties and complexities that the native speaker might well intuit. Much of this, of course, is correct. But the question is whether an ordinary translation normally can get much beyond the second level. If the meaning of the one Hebrew word in the different verses is variously wind, breath, and Spirit (in English!), those are the words the translation will have to use (second level). A translation could, doubtless, preserve one English word for the one Hebrew word (say, “wind”), but the preservation of formal equivalence would entail an indefensible semantic loss. Footnotes can of course draw attention to the presence of one Hebrew word behind the three English words (drawing attention to the third level), but most translations will not resort to such niceties except in cases where the meaning is totally lost unless the wordplay is grasped. As for analyzing and explaining the subtle connections and complexities (fourth level), that is what commentaries and preachers do. Of course, it is possible to construct a Bible with various layers of footnotes, which in effect lift the translation pretty close to level 3, with occasional insight

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at level 4. That is now being done in the rather remarkable NET Bible.47 But observe that it is not the translation per se that is being lifted to a higher level. Rather, it is the complex system of notes that lifts the discussion. In other words, the NET Bible is not simply a translation, but a translation-cum-explanationcum-commentary. It is, in effect, a fine crib for those who don’t know their Hebrew and Greek very well. But so far as the actual translation goes, although the notes explain a little more of what goes into the decisions, one is still left with level 2, occasionally rising to level 3. In other words, Poythress and Grudem rightly explain some rudiments in linguistic theory and then abuse their own theory by not admitting that basic translations really cannot frequently rise much beyond level 2. While the goal is certainly to preserve as much meaning as possible, translation is an inexact discipline, and something is invariably lost in any basic translation. One is constantly forced to make decisions—which is one of the fundamental reasons why there are commentaries and preachers. But somewhere along the line, Poythress and Grudem start referring to any loss of any meaning at any level as a “distortion” and an “inaccuracy,” finally challenging the integrity of those who admit such things. But all translators, including Poythress and Grudem, are inevitably bound up with making choices about the “nuances” they get across. In that sense, all translations are driven by choices, and all presuppose interpretation and an assumed grid of what is most importantly preserved. New Testament scholar Daniel Wallace provides an interesting example of the complexity of competing principles, of the difficulty of making decisions.48 While working on the NET Bible, he and his co-translators struggled with the sentence, “I will make you fishers of men” (KJV, RSV, NIV, and many others). The Greek phrase rendered “fishers of men” is halieis anthrompomn, and, unwilling to give the impression—to some contemporary readers—that the disciples were to be fishers of adult males only, they were unsatisfied with “men.” Further, although “fishers of men” is a common expression among many churchgoers, in fact the word “fishers” is archaic. It is no longer used except in that expression. The NRSV resolves these two problems by rendering the clause, “I will make you fish for people.” But Wallace rightly points out that this sounds as though Jesus will force his disciples to “fish for people,” which is scarcely what is meant. Moreover, the shift from noun to verb (“fishers” to “fish”) might be thought to signal a shift from a new occupation to merely a new activity. The NLT and the TEV avoid the first problem but not the second, with, respectively, “I will show you how to fish for people” and “I will teach you to catch people.” But both “show you” and “teach you” introduce nuances that are not quite faithful, either—and still we are left with verbs. Some have suggested, “I will make you

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fishermen of people,” which solves several problems and removes the archaism, though most would acknowledge that the expression sounds thoroughly awkward and cumbersome. Still, it is better than “I will make you fishers of mankind” or “I will make you fishers of humankind,” since these renderings give the impression that the mission includes Gentiles, which is certainly not what the disciples would have understood at that point in redemptive history— and probably not quite what Jesus himself meant at that point in redemptive history, either. As Wallace comments, “This text illustrates the clash of translational objectives of accuracy, readability, and elegance. At bottom, we believe that the great value of the NET Bible is its extensive notes that wrestle with such issues, for the footnotes become a way for us to have our cake and eat it too.”49 The NET scholars finally opted for “I will turn you into fishers of people,” thus choosing to stick with the archaism because the alternatives struck them as worse. The point of this discussion is not to commend or condemn the NET decision. It is to point out that the NET scholars implicitly agree with Poythress and Grudem when they acknowledge that translation is an inexact discipline that involves compromise—give and take—and that there are subtleties in the source text that demand the most careful evaluation about how best to preserve them without introducing too many extraneous notions. The difference, of course, is that the NET scholars, recognizing these tensions, work them out the best they can and by their system of notes provide some indication of their wrestlings and reasonings. By contrast, Poythress and Grudem articulate reasonably sound theory, but every time a decision goes against their favored “nuance,” they accuse their opponents of distorting Scripture and introducing inaccuracies. At some point, one begins to suspect that it is their argument that is ideologically driven.

Issues of Changes in English Usage Part of the debate turns on whether there has been sufficient change in English usage in the West, especially in America, to warrant more sensitivity in our translations to gender-inclusive issues. Valerie Becker Makkai, an associate professor in linguistics at the University of Illinois (Chicago), wrote the foreword to the book by Poythress and Grudem. There she devotes no small part of her space to arguing that the large-scale empirical studies have not been done to provide the hard evidence that would answer such questions. Doubtless she is correct. Large-scale empirical studies have not yet been done. But that does not mean that large-scale changes have not taken place; it simply means that the large-scale empirical studies have not yet been done to prove with hard numbers that such changes have (or have not) taken place. Rather more scathingly, in their sixth appendix Poythress and Grudem argue for the continuing usability of generic

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“he.” Certainly it’s easy enough to find sectors of society where inclusive language has made relatively little impression. For various reasons I move in quite different sectors, and, although I’m relying on what I personally observe rather than on large-scale empirical studies, I cannot help noting that generic “he” is more acceptable in culturally conservative sectors of the country than in culturally liberal sectors. But I have been doing university missions for thirty years, and in such quarters inclusive language dominates. Not to use it is offensive. Implicitly, of course, Poythress and Grudem recognize that English usage is changing, since even the Colorado Springs Guidelines, to which they subscribe, allow for some accommodation in this regard. In fact, a recent essay by Mark Strauss documents how many inclusive-language changes the ESV has introduced to the RSV.50 Some are changes from “men” to “people” (e.g., Matt 5:15). Sometimes, however, the ESV changes “men” to “others” (e.g., Matt 5:11–12 RSV: “Blessed are you when men revile you . . . for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you”; ESV: “Blessed are you when others revile you . . . for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you”). To change “men” to “others” is entirely acceptable to me; it is a bit strange to find it in a translation prepared by those who argue that translation should rise to what they call the third and fourth level. There is certainly some change in nuance from “men” to “others”—not least in contemporary culture where the word “others” is increasingly taking on an overtone, a nuance, of outsider that is not found in “men” (unless, I suppose, written by some “women”!). This change is far from rare (e.g., Matt 5:16 RSV: “Let your light so shine before men”; ESV: “let your light so shine before others”). Other changes include • Matthew 7:9 RSV: “what man of you”; ESV: “which one of you”; • Matthew 16:24 RSV: “If any man will come after me”; ESV: “If anyone will come after me”; • Matthew 19:11 RSV: “Not all men can receive this saying”; ESV: “Not everyone can receive this saying”; • Matthew 22:16 RSV: “care for no man”; ESV: “you do not care about anyone’s opinion.” I am not arguing that any of these translated phrases are wrong, still less that they’re wicked. Some are better than others. But I am certainly saying that there are changes of “nuance” in such pairs as men/you, any man/anyone, men/others, and so forth—and the presence of such changes in the ESV, where Grudem has had such a strong hand, show that there is an implicit recognition of a change of English usage in the land. And I am saying that in countless passages they themselves implicitly recognize that translators ought to be aware of contemporary

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usage and that in basic translations (i.e., translations without cumbersome footnotes), it is difficult to operate beyond the second level, with occasional forays into the third. They are making such changes—I would not call them distortions or inaccuracies—all the time, and the changes certainly carry slight differences of nuance. But when others make similar changes with respect to the pronoun “he,” Poythress and Grudem condemn them for distorting the Word of God. In a rather heated review, Vern Poythress insists that both Mark Strauss and I are not sensitive enough to the fact that “feminists pay attention to generic ‘he’ and load it with connotations because [feminists] can thereby use it as a means of detecting ideological resistance. Once offenders are located, [these offenders] are persuaded to conform, or else labeled insensitive or chauvinistic.” He adds the following: They [Carson and Strauss] could not frankly discuss the ideological connotation of generic “he” because it represents a land mine capable of exploding the illusion that the issue is merely clear communication. The central issue is ideology. It is a modern ideology that makes generic “he” unacceptable even though it is intelligible. Ideological influence heats up the whole issue. Messrs. Carson and Strauss want people on all sides to cool down. The desire for peace and sanity is admirable. But the ideological conflict will not go away. And God’s Word does not change in order to appease modern feminists’ ideas about language.51 Reviewers should be careful about what authors could or “could not frankly discuss,” because they are extending a challenge that constitutes an invitation. I am more than happy to discuss it. Such a discussion could easily take up a chapter, but I shall restrict myself to the following points: 1. I acknowledge that much of the demand for reform of the English language on this point is from active feminists. Much of the push for change is ideologically driven. I don’t think all of it is, but certainly much of it is. 2. Would Poythress want to say that everything that feminists and their forebears have introduced is bad? Would he like to disavow, say, universal suffrage? Granted that a fair bit of feminist rhetoric is overheated and mean-spirited, is it not fair to say that there have been countless abuses of women and that anything Christians can do to rectify injustice is a good thing, so long as we adhere to biblical perspectives on what justice is? I think that Dr. Poythress would agree. The implication, surely, is that it is important, in the face of feminist demands, not to tar the entire movement with one broad brush. One must try to assess where,

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The Challenge of Bible Translation in the light of Scripture, feminist agendas make telling points, where their demands make little difference (from a biblical point of view), and where they seem to fly in the face of Scripture. That is why I, and Dr. Strauss, too, for that matter, are complementarians and not egalitarians. But this is a far cry from saying that there is nothing to be learned from feminist cries and from feminist writings. It is never wise to build a fence around Torah and try to become more righteous than Torah; it is always wise to discern where one should draw a line and where one should not draw it. By contrast, linguistic conservatism in the name of warning people against the “slippery slope”52 discourages Christians from thinking through where the real issues are. 3. Although (as we have seen) the matter is disputed, my best guess is that, regardless of the motivations driving at least a good part of the push for reform of English usage, increasingly that push will prove successful. If so, increasing numbers of people who themselves will not be driven by an active feminist agenda will take on the English usage that was in substantial measure fomented by feminists. In other words, regardless of the reasons for change in the language, the language is changing. Implicitly, even the ESV acknowledges the point by allowing some changes that accommodate inclusive-language concerns.53 4. It is true that “the ideological conflict will not go away,” as Poythress puts it. But that is merely another way of saying that the confrontation must take place at the right points. There is, for example, a growing and admirable literature that gives many good reasons why it is inappropriate to change the language of Scripture so as to address God as “our heavenly Mother” or the like. Meanwhile, I know not a few complementarians who are becoming unwilling to stand up for their beliefs, not because they are intimidated by feminists, but because they do not want to be associated with the increasingly shrill polemic that so roundly condemns fellow complementarians for not drawing linguistic lines where Poythress and Grudem draw them!54 5. I entirely agree with Poythress’s last sentence, namely, that “God’s Word does not change in order to appease modern feminists’ ideas about language.” God’s Word, after all, was given in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, and it does not change. But the translations change as the receptor languages change, regardless of the motivations that some entertain for those changes. The proof, as we have seen, is the ESV itself. Where the line must be drawn is where a translation is domesticating God’s Word such that the truth of Scripture is distorted. Translators may sometimes

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differ as to when that is happening; certainly we need one another, so as to foster honesty and integrity in debate. But the countless minor accommodations and choices that every translator has to make in just about every sentence, demanded by the fact that the source language and the receptor language are different, should not be confused with such matters of substance.55

Issues of Varied Gender Systems around the World In my book on inclusive-language translation, I devoted quite a bit of space to outlining the gender systems of various languages, showing how different they are in many instances from the conventions used both in the biblical languages and in English for that matter. Poythress and Grudem dismiss the argument: The underlying assumption in this objection is that only what can easily be conveyed into all languages is worth conveying in English. When we draw this assumption out into the open, it refutes itself. . . . Of course, we agree that some languages in the world may not have all the capabilities for expression that English does, and in those cases translators will have to do the best they can with those languages. . . . But all of those considerations are simply changing the subject, which is how to translate the Bible into English today.56 But here Poythress and Grudem are ascribing to me views I have never held and are not listening fairly to what I actually wrote. I have never held the view that “only what can easily be conveyed into all languages is worth conveying in English.” Nor did that notion form any part of my assumptions. Rather, my discussion was responding to constantly repeated arguments to the effect that where we have the masculine pronoun in Hebrew, the English must have a masculine pronoun or else we are betraying the Word of God. By showing how varied are gender systems around the world, I demonstrated that in some receptor languages, preservation of a masculine pronoun may not even be an option, and that even in the move from Hebrew (or Greek) to English there are differences in their respective gender systems that make this sort of appeal to formal equivalence not only impossible (in some contexts), but nonsense. I provided many examples. Poythress and Grudem tackle none of them. This is not to say that preservation of formal equivalence is always a bad thing, of course; it is to say, rather, that appeal to loyalty and faithfulness toward the Word of God as the ground for preserving formal equivalence is both ignorant and manipulative, precisely because the significance and range of use of a masculine pronoun in Hebrew are demonstrably not the same as the significance and range of use of a

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masculine pronoun in English. A great deal depends on the gender systems of the respective languages and then on the individual contexts. Poythress and Grudem appear on occasion to have taken the argument on board, and then when someone disagrees with them over the exact force of a particular context, very quickly they resort to an appeal to Scripture’s truthfulness and authority, as though the other party were abandoning it. Popular journalists have merely followed their lead, sometimes with even more inflated rhetoric. This stance, more than anything else, is what has heated up this debate.

Issues of Distinctions between Singular and Plural Forms Although the ESV (which Poythress and Grudem favor) introduces, as we have seen, hundreds of changes (such as the change from “men” to “others”) to accommodate the concerns of inclusive language in our changing culture, Poythress and Grudem are especially resistant to certain kinds of changes. They do not seem troubled by changes in nuance or the failure to meet “fourth level” translation theory when it comes to their approved changes, but their wrath knows few bounds when the TNIV deploys a plural instead of a singular. For instance, in Revelation 3:20 the NIV reads, “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” The TNIV reads, “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.” In one circulated e-mail message, Grudem comments, “The TNIV mistranslates the masculine singular pronoun autos, substituting plural pronouns, thus losing the teaching that Jesus has fellowship with the individual believer. This type of change was made frequently (e.g., Luke 9:23; John 14:23; Romans 14:7).” What shall we make of this reasoning? Certainly in some passages, the distinction between the singular and the plural is crucial and should be preserved. That is why generic solutions to translation problems must be assessed on a caseby-case basis. But the significance of the plural, in many contexts, must not be overstated or the comprehensiveness of the Greek generic autos overlooked. That is one of the reasons why they can sometimes be put in parallel: e.g., “You have heard [plural] that it was said, ‘Love [singular] your neighbor and hate [singular] your enemy [singular].’ But I tell you: Love [plural] your enemies [plural] and pray [plural] for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:43–44). Jesus’ quotation takes over the singular form used in the LXX, but precisely because that singular form is recognized from the context to have generic force, we recognize that the OT command was not restricted to an individual but extended to everyone to whom the command applied. Even the singular “enemy” does not mean that

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believers only have one enemy. The utterance has a proverbial ring, with the force “your enemy, whoever that enemy may be.” Jesus’ commands, in the plural, certainly do not mean that he is removing the responsibility of the individual, mandating only corporate love without regard for the obligation of the individual disciple to love. In other words, a plural command or a plural prohibition may signal a group activity, but it may not—the context must decide.57 A prohibition against lust, written in the plural, certainly does not mean that the only thing that is prohibited is group lust (whatever that is). It means, rather, that all within the group addressed face the same prohibition. If the prohibition had been in the singular, but written in a context of moral constraints for a general audience and not to a named individual, then the singular form nevertheless applies to all who fall within the general audience. Yes, there is a small shift in nuance, but the application in the two cases is exactly the same. As in the case with “I will make you [?] fishers [?] of men [?],” decisions have to be taken as to how best to get things across. Grudem prefers “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me”; TNIV offers “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.” But with the best will in the world, it is difficult to see how this change loses “the teaching that Jesus has fellowship with the individual believer,” precisely because the preceding “anyone” is preserved in both instances.58 And meanwhile, if for the envisaged readership of TNIV the pronouns “him” and “he” have the effect, whatever the ideology that has produced such changes in linguistic associations, of excluding approximately half of humanity, one could responsibly argue that the TNIV is, for such a readership, a more accurate, more faithful translation than the NIV or the ESV. As Craig Blomberg puts it in his review in Denver Journal of The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy, “It is doubtful if most modern American listeners will interpret ‘blessed are those who . . .’ (whether in the Proverbs or the Beatitudes) as a corporate reference that excludes individual application, but on more than one occasion I have add [sic] well-educated adults in churches that use the NIV ask me why the Proverbs were only addressed to men or sons and not applicable to women or daughters.”59

Issues from Chapter 2 of Hebrews Other theological errors have been ascribed to the TNIV. For convenience, it may be useful to focus on two verses from the Epistle to the Hebrews— Hebrews 2:6 and Hebrews 2:17.

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The Challenge of Bible Translation Hebrews 2:6 What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” HEBREWS 2:6 NIV, italics added

What are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” HEBREWS 2:6 TNIV, italics added

The charge is made that the TNIV obscures the quotation from Psalm 8:4, mistranslates three words by turning them into plurals, and loses the messianic application of “son of man” to Jesus Christ. I have probably said enough about the use of the plural. Whether the TNIV obscures the connection with Psalm 8:4 will depend a bit on how it translates Psalm 8:4, which has not yet been published. The serious charge, in my view, is that this loses the messianic application to Jesus Christ. Yet here, too, the charge is less than fair. The expression “son of man” in the Old Testament can have powerful messianic overtones, of course (see Daniel 7:13–14), but it is far from being invariable: about eighty times it is used as a form of address to the prophet Ezekiel, without any messianic overtone whatsoever. So whether the expression has messianic content or not must be argued, not merely asserted. In Psalm 8, the overwhelming majority of commentators see the expression as a gentilic, parallel to the Hebrew for “man” in the preceding line. (Incidentally, gentilic nouns in Hebrew are often singular in form but plural in referent—which may also address the indignation over the shift to the plural.) In the context of the application of Psalm 8:4 to Jesus in Hebrews 2, one should at least recognize that the nature of the application to Jesus is disputed. Scanning my commentaries on Hebrews (I have about forty of them), over three-quarters of them do not think that “son of man” here functions as a messianic title but simply as a gentilic, as in Psalm 8. If this exegesis is correct (and I shall argue elsewhere and at length that it is), Jesus is said to be “son of man,” not in function of the messianic force of that title in Daniel 7:13–14, but in function of his becoming a human being—which all sides recognize is one of the major themes of Hebrews 2. If one wishes to take the opposite tack—that “son of man” here is a messianic title—there are competent interpreters who have taken that line. But it is not a matter of theological orthodoxy, since understanding the text one way does not mean that the translator (or the commentator) is denying the complementary truth but is merely asserting that the complementary truth is not in view here. One could even imagine a more subtle argument, one with which I would have some sympathy: It is possible to see in “son of man” in Psalm 8:4 a gentilic,

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rightly preserved in Hebrews 2, and then wonder if, owing to the frequency of “son of man” as a messianic title in the Synoptic Gospels, early Christian ears might have picked up an additional overtone, without reading a messianic interpretation into the entire passage. This is possible, though hard to prove. The possibility could be accommodated by a footnote cue after “human beings” in the TNIV, the footnote itself reading “Or, son of man.” But at the level of actual translation, it is difficult to find legitimate reasons for condemning the TNIV rendering in such absolutist terms. Hebrews 2:17 For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. HEBREWS 2:17 NIV, italics added

For this reason he had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. HEBREWS 2:17 TNIV, italics added

This, it is said, is doubly bad: In this context, the Greek word cannot mean “brothers and sisters,” since Jewish high priests were exclusively male, and of course Jesus himself is male; and worse, the notion that Jesus was “made like his . . . sisters in every way” is unthinkable, or conjures up the specter of androgyny, which the text certainly does not support. Once again, however, the charges are easy to make, yet not quite fair. First, even the NIV’s translation, “brothers in every way,” must be read in its context. This does not mean that Jesus must be like each “brother” in every conceivable way—as short as all of them, as tall as all of them, as old or young as all of them, as married or unmarried as all of them, as heterosexual or homosexual as all of them, and so forth. The context imposes a couple of strong foci. Already verse 14 states, “Since the children [mentioned in the previous verse] have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death.” In other words, Jesus must become thoroughly human; he must take on “flesh and blood” and in that sense be “like his brothers in every way.” But if the focus is on being human, then for Jesus to become “like his brothers and sisters in every way” is not contextually misleading. The second constraint is found in verse 16. There we are told that “it is not

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angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants.” It is surely a cause for wonder and praise that there has arisen a Redeemer for fallen human beings, though not for fallen angels. But now the human focus becomes narrowed by the historical context of Jesus’ incarnation: he did not become a generic human being, but a descendant of Abraham. The purpose of his coming was that “he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people” (2:17)—which surely shows that his identification is with “the people,” and not only with males (unless we are prepared to argue that only the males had atonement made for them?). Second, all sides recognize now, I think, that sometimes Greek adelphoi can refer to a crowd of both men and women, making the rendering “brothers and sisters” in some contexts admissible, especially if being read by some who think that “brothers” automatically excludes women. But despite the connections with all of humanity, and then with all of the Jewish race (and not males only) that the context affords, it remains true that Jewish high priests were invariably men. The TNIV expression does not deny that point, of course, but it does not clarify it either. Jesus is not like a Jewish high priest in every respect, anyway—this epistle will go on to show many parallels between Jesus and Jewish high priests (e.g., 8:3) but also quite a few differences. The point here is not that Jesus is like a Jewish high priest “in every way” but that he is like those he comes to redeem “in every way.” Still, the TNIV is vaguely awkward—though whether that awkwardness is worse than the awkwardness felt by those for whom “brothers” is a restrictive expression may be debated. Third, in any case the charge that the TNIV text says Jesus is “made like his . . . sisters in every way,” opening up the possibility of androgyny, is inept. The dots of the ellipsis are important, because the expression “brothers and sisters” is a unified pair that must be taken together, like “flesh and blood.” Verse 14 should not be rendered, “Since the children have . . . blood, he too shared in their humanity”—for it is the paired expression “flesh and blood” that indicates humanness. Other passages have been highlighted by Poythress and Grudem and by journalists who have followed them, but they are, quite frankly, no more convincing than these. I am not always persuaded that the TNIV has taken the best option. But that is rather different from saying that the TNIV is theologically compromised.60 There is an array of other matters that could be raised. Most of them have little to do with translation theory in general or functional equivalence in particular, so I must not pause long to explore them here. Still, I am uncertain why such animus has been raised against the NIV/TNIV, and not against, say, the

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TEV, NLT, and a host of other Bible versions. World magazine has invested a lot of polemic in critical comments about the money that is involved in the NIV and TNIV—but this is true, of course, of all Bible publishers, and even of the publishers of World, who doubtless sell more copies when a debate heats up.61 Would it not be good to recognize that there are people of good will on both sides of this debate? Both sides are trying to be true to Scripture, and to make their understandings known; and both make money in the process.62 OOO

Since I wrote my little essay on the limits of dynamic equivalence a couple of decades ago, these, then, are the three changes that have taken place in the climate of discussion—the continuing development and maturation of translation theory,63 the linguistically conservative stances being adopted in some quarters, and the rising tide of agenda-driven responses to even the most confessionally faithful inclusive-language translations. The first of these three developments means that some of my early articulation of the limitations of functional equivalence is now less urgent, since the bestinformed translators have matured in various ways. The second and third developments adopt stances that are so critical of functional equivalence that their adherents will think that what I have written in the past is, if anything, too mild. But that is why I have thought it necessary to review some of the limitations on more direct translation in the first part of this essay. Too many of the linguistic conservatives can detect problems with functional equivalence (both real and imagined) but cannot detect problems with more direct translation. The changed climate means that such limitations have to be spelled out so that the strengths of functional equivalence are understood, at least in measure, before some of the limitations of the theory are reviewed. But now it is high time to turn to the latter.

THE LIMITS OF FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCE IN BIBLE TRANSLATION For the vast majority of people actually engaged in Bible translation, the importance of functional equivalence is a given—and rightly so. Its victory is hailed by numerous pieces of evidence. There is widespread recognition of the inadequacy of merely formal equivalence in translation, buttressed by thousands and thousands of examples. Undergirding such recognition is the awareness that expressions such as “literal translation” and “paraphrase” are steeped in ambiguity and, in any case, belong, not in mutually exclusive categories, but on the

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same spectrum:64 A “too literal” translation can be as bad as a “too paraphrastic” translation, if for different reasons. Few translators of any competence would today deny such fundamental priorities as the following: 1. Contextual consistency has priority over verbal consistency (or word-for-word concordance). 2. Dynamic equivalence has priority over formal correspondence. 3. The aural (heard) form of language has priority over the written form. 4. Forms that are used by and acceptable to the audience for which a translation is intended have priority over forms that may be traditionally more prestigious.65 Functional equivalence displays its triumph in the publishing houses—in the continuing parade of helps,66 front-rank research,67 manuals of problems,68 reflective textbooks,69 assorted popularizations,70and sane assessments of recent translations.71 Missiologists are now comfortable with classifications of languages based not on their roots (e.g., Indo-European, Semitic) but on their use (or nonuse) in literature and education (primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary), and they have become sensitive to the differences between translating the Bible in an “overlap language” (one in which the colloquial and the literary forms of the language overlap significantly, e.g., English) and translating the Bible almost exclusively at a literary level (e.g., Arabic).72 As they have been sensitized to the kinds of readers, so they sympathize with the very different linguistic needs of diverse readers within any particular language or dialect. There is a new appreciation for the work of the receptor-language stylist in the translation process;73 and in the best seminaries, lecturers in Greek and Hebrew take extra pains to convey a literary feel for the biblical languages and to introduce the rudiments of discourse analysis and aspect theory, no less than the rudiments of the grammar produced in the rationalistic period. Even unreconstructed grammarians such as myself, thoroughly convinced that a profound and growing knowledge of the source languages is a great desideratum in Bible translation, are no less concerned to expose their students to the elements of modern linguistic theory and practice. At least in part, all of this has come about because functional equivalence, rightly understood, is essential for good translation. Only the linguistically incompetent would argue today that the translator needs facility in the languages with which he or she is working but not an understanding of the content of the text. At its best, functional equivalence, far from jeopardizing good translations, is essential for fidelity in translation—fidelity in

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conveying not only meaning but also tone, emotional impact, naturalness/awkwardness, and much more.74 Inevitably, some have abused “dynamic equivalence” and “functional equivalence” to justify poor translations, or even to justify entire theological agendas. I hasten to add that the most careful scholars in this field do not err in such ways. What is still one of the finest books in the area—The Theory and Practice of Translation by Eugene Nida and Charles Taber—abounds in wise and sensitive caveats. For example, translators are carefully warned against trying to get behind the biblical writers, or ahead of them,75 and are cautioned not to confuse linguistic translation with “cultural translation,” transforming the Pharisees and Sadducees, for instance, into present-day religious parties.76 In other words, the historical particularity of the text must be respected. Sadly, though, similar care is not shown by all. The caveats and restrictions that protect a responsible use of functional equivalence and make it such a useful way of thinking about translation are sometimes overlooked or abandoned. This route has become easier to follow, as professional missiologists have come to think of contextualization in highly diverse ways77 and as the theoretical developments that have fed into postmodern epistemology generate their own pressures on translators and their art. Such developments are so complex I dare not broach them here, except tangentially. But it may be useful to offer a number of reflections on functional equivalence and related matters, reflections that may help translators avoid the pitfalls inherent in some of these developments.

LIMITS ON THE EQUIVALENCE OF RESPONSE The most common descriptions of functional equivalence, and certainly all the early descriptions of dynamic equivalence, as insightful as they are, laid so much stress on the equivalence of response that they invited abuse. For example, in the classic treatment, Eugene Nida describes dynamic equivalence translation as the “closest natural equivalent to the source-language message” and insists it is “directed primarily toward equivalence of response rather than equivalence of form.”78 Elsewhere he writes the following: Dynamic equivalence is therefore to be defined in terms of the degree to which the receptors of the message in the receptor language respond to it in substantially the same manner as the receptors in the source language. This response can never be identical, for the cultural and historical settings are too different, but there should be a high degree of equivalence of response, or the translation will have failed to accomplish its purpose.79

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Or as Norm Mundhenk remarks, “In the final analysis, a translation is good or bad, right or wrong, in terms of how the reader understands and reacts.”80 I have no quarrel with these quotations, all three of which stress equivalence of response, as long as they are referring to linguistic priorities alone. Clearly, a translation is poor if by preserving formal equivalence in word order or syntactical construction or the like it obscures the meaning of the original text or transmutes it into something quite different or remains completely opaque to those whose tongue is the receptor language. Moreover, selecting appropriate linguistic priorities requires a sensitive knowledge of the receptor culture, since there may be cultural associations between linguistic constructions and cultural values such that an entirely false impression is conveyed by a more direct translation—false, that is to say, as measured by what was originally conveyed. “Blessed is the man who does not . . . stand in the way of sinners” (Ps 1:1 NIV) is a shockingly poor rendering of the Hebrew, because to stand in someone’s way in English means “to hinder someone,” whereas the thought in Hebrew is “to walk in someone’s footsteps,” “to walk in someone’s moccasins,” or, less metaphorically, “to adopt someone else’s lifestyle and values and habits.” There are far more difficult cases discussed in the standard texts; and, as pursued by those with genuine expertise, functional equivalence in such cases is surely an eminently worthwhile goal that no one competent in two or more languages would wish to gainsay. Nevertheless, the emphasis on equivalence of reception is open to abuse. If translators begin to think that what is referred to lies at the level of the receptor’s epistemology, then of course it is impossible to measure. Moreover, the passion to communicate well may begin to overlook what is being communicated, for we have already seen that there are several goals the translator must bear in mind, including both accuracy and comprehensibility. To focus all one’s attention on the former (understood in the fashion of the most “direct” translation theories) at the expense of the latter is no virtue; to focus all one’s attention on the latter at the expense of the former is betrayal.81 There are several other ways in which the emphasis on equivalence of response is open to abuse. Perhaps it is best to provide illustrations of several kinds of abuse. To focus discussion, I shall draw them from the writings of wellknown linguist, anthropologist, and missiologist Charles Kraft. Kraft argues that the “response” element of functional equivalence may usefully be extended somewhat further to take into account the peculiar social location of the receptor culture. At the extreme, the resulting “versions” may be called “transculturations” (to use the language of Kraft).82 He writes, “In a translation it is inappropriate to give the impression that Jesus walked the streets of

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Berkeley or London or Nairobi. But a transculturation, in order to reach its target audience more effectively, may do exactly that.”83 These transculturations “dare to be specific to their audiences and free to be true to God’s imperative to communicate rather than simply to impress. In this they demonstrate the deep concern of their authors for the total communicational situation, not simply for one or another aspect of it.”84 Kraft then goes on to suggest (as he does elsewhere) that those who disagree with his diagnosis and who react negatively against “proper transculturation” are the modern equivalents of the “orthodox” retainers of the old cultural forms against whom Jesus “waged a running battle for culturally relevant transculturation,” or of the “orthodox” Judaizers of Acts 15.85 These assessments raise a host of issues. A glimpse of them may be afforded by a series of questions: • Did Jesus primarily or even marginally set himself against the Jewish religious leaders of his day out of concern for the transculturation of an agreed message, or out of a fundamental break with his opponents’ understanding of Scripture? How much of his disagreement stemmed from their failure to perceive the new developments on the salvationhistorical plane—his claims to fulfill Old Testament expectations concerning the coming of the Messiah? • How valid is the constant disjunction Kraft raises between his own approach to “dynamic-equivalence transculturation” and a kind of incompetent fixation on mere content devoid of desire and/or ability to communicate? Is the disjunction essentially fair, or does it approach caricature? • To what extent do the questions that Kraft insists on putting to the biblical text—and making the biblical text answer in his terms—domesticate the text so that the message of the text is essentially lost? To what extent must interpreters allow the text, progressively, to raise the right sort of questions—questions it is prepared to answer in its own terms? More broadly: When we say that we aim to generate the same response in the readers of the receptor language as in the readers of the source language, what do we mean? Suppose the readers of the original New Testament documents were largely alienated by the truth of what, say, Paul, wrote. Should we aim to reproduce similar alienation today in order to preserve “equivalence of response”? What does “equivalence of response” mean when we compare the response of urban, secularized, twenty-first-century readers of Leviticus or Romans and the response of their respective first readers or hearers? Is it not better, if we are going to define functional equivalence in terms of equivalent

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response, to understand equivalence in linguistic categories, i.e., in terms of the removal of as many as possible of the false linguistic barriers (along with the associations each linguistic category carries) that actually impede the communication of the content of the text? Each of these questions could easily generate its own paper, and one or two of them will reemerge in subsequent points. It is clear, however, that the hidden fallacy against which many of these questions are directed is the unwitting assumption that “response” is the ultimate category in translation. Strictly speaking, this is not true; theologically speaking, it is unwise; evangelistically speaking, it is uncontrolled, not to say dangerous. Of course, the concerns Kraft is feeling are real ones that constantly need addressing. Nevertheless my criticism is fundamental: his solution, the elevation of response above truth, fails precisely in the areas where it claims to be strong, for the response is not rendered equivalent by such means as he advances. The aim of a good translation is to convey the total content, or as much of it as possible in roughly equivalent compass—informational, emotional, connotational, etc.—of the original message to the reader (or hearer, where the translation is publicly read) in the receptor language. In the same ways, to speak of “dynamic-equivalence theologizing”86 and “dynamic-equivalence churches”87 is misleading and even dangerous, because the categories are not linguistic. Once again, the concerns behind these labels are real. For example, biblically faulty and/or culturally myopic ecclesiastical structures may be imposed on a mission church as though the entire blueprint were handed down from heaven, complete with robes for the choir and Roberts’ Rules of Order. Nevertheless, all such evils are better addressed without talking of “dynamic-equivalence churches” for at least a couple of reasons: First, as the expression is used by its inventor, social custom becomes so controlling that the Scriptures are not permitted to reform society. Kraft appeals to the Kru of Liberia who state, “You cannot trust a man with only one wife,”88 concluding that Kru church leadership need not be monogamous, despite the strictures of Paul (and Jesus!) on this point. Kraft thinks that eventually polygamy would likely die out among the Kru, “just as, through God’s interaction with the Hebrews, polygamy died out in Hebrew culture—over the course of a few thousand years.”89 Until then, polygamy should be tolerated. There seem to be, from Kraft’s treatment, few things the Bible clearly demands of church structure— or even of morals—that could not be jettisoned in favor of “dynamic-equivalence churches.” Second, and more important, the extension of the expression “dynamic equivalence” (or the more recent “functional equivalence”) to areas far removed not only from linguistic priorities but also from translation itself reflects

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back on problems of translation and muddies otherwise clear distinctions. In Kraft’s hands, all the emphasis is on “dynamic”; the “equivalence” has pretty well dissolved. Applied to translation, almost any distance from the source text could be justified.

LIMITS ON THE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN MEANING AND MESSAGE Whereas dynamic equivalence and functional equivalence started out belonging to the realm of translation and were set in opposition to various kinds of linguistic formalism, the extension of their use to far broader issues has been facilitated on the one hand by a variety of faddish theoretical constructs that do not stand up to rigorous scholarship but are cited with ill-deserved authority as though the subjects with which they deal were closed—e.g., the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,90 the new hermeneutic,91 and some communication theory—and on the other hand by the epistemological relativism endemic to postmodernism. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in its crudest form, makes human beings the determined captives of their language, and their language becomes a guide to their “social reality.”92 In its extreme form, the new hermeneutic calls into question the possibility of objective knowledge as text and interpreter progressively “interpret” one another, round and round without terminus, lost in profound relativity. Some forms of communication theory, conjoined with structuralism, insist that there is a rigid dichotomy between meaning and message. And the various strands that have fed into postmodern epistemology conspire to convince many contemporaries that knowledge of objective truth is not possible for finite human beings, and this opens the door to individually determined or communally determined “meaning” whose distance from a theoretical “objective” content of a text is as impossible to calculate as the “objective” content is to know.93 All four of these notions lie not far from the surface of the following quotation (whether or not the author intended to make the connections): Contemporary understandings contend that a major difference between messages and meanings lies in the fact that messages can be transmitted in linguistic form while meanings exist only in the hearts and minds of people. Contemporary communiologists [sic] see communicators with meanings in their minds that they would like to transmit to receptors. Communicators take these meanings and formulate them, usually in linguistic form, into messages which they then transmit to receptors. Receptors then, listen to the messages and construct within their minds sets of meanings that may or may not correspond with the meanings intended by the communicator.

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The Challenge of Bible Translation Meanings, therefore, do not pass from me to you, only messages. The meanings exist only within me or within you. . . . The messages, then, serve as stimulators rather than as containers. Receptors, in response to the stimulus of messages, construct meanings that may or may not correspond to what the communicator intended.94

There is considerable insight here, of course. No finite knower ever understands anything substantial exactly as some other finite knower understands it, and the point needs reiterating from time to time. Each person is finite in understanding, and the potential for misunderstanding increases when the message is translated. Communicators do not always say exactly what they mean, and the best communicators will try to encourage the feedback necessary to discover whether their meaning has been absorbed by the receptors, at least to some substantial degree. Nevertheless, the above quotation puts the case far too disjunctively. Doubtless some contemporary understandings contend that there is “a major difference between messages and meanings,” but others, while recognizing that any individual communication may be imperfectly grasped, insist that the message/meaning disjunction, taken absolutely, is one form of the intentional fallacy; that human beings cannot entertain in their own minds complex meanings without propositions, and that therefore meaning and message, though not identical, cannot be divided absolutely; that the commonality of our creaturehood in the image of God makes verbal communication less problematic than some think; that even participant knowledge can be verbalized among those who share common participant experience (whether sex or knowing God); that individuals can in measure “distantiate” themselves from their own “horizon of understanding” and “fuse” their horizon with that of the communicator in order to assure true understanding of the message, even though it may not be exhaustive understanding; that meanings can and do pass from one person to the other (as judged by the ways many authors are upset when they think that reviewers have not understood what they have said and have misrepresented it); that messages are neither mere stimulators nor mere communicators, but the very stuff of the meaning, insofar as the two individuals share semantic ranges and the like and insofar as the communicators say what they mean. As virtually always in the arguments of postmoderns, the passage presupposes that either one person can understand the meaning of another person exhaustively, omnisciently as it were, or one is forced to the sorts of disjunctions introduced here between meaning and message. If this antithesis is accepted, the

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postmodernist invariably wins, since it can always be shown that no finite human being can ever know the thoughts or meanings of another finite human being perfectly, exhaustively, omnisciently. But the antithesis is, of course, a false one. One may know something truly without knowing it exhaustively; I may understand a great deal of the meanings of, say, Paul, without knowing Paul’s thought—even his recorded thought—exhaustively or perfectly. In other words, the absolute disjunction between meaning and message has in fact bought into an epistemological framework that thoughtful Christians will avoid. To seek to justify “dynamic-equivalence theologizing” on such doubtful epistemological premises is unsafe. In any case, such discussions, as important as they are, have removed dynamic equivalence and functional equivalence so far from the linguistic domain that more confusion than clarity has been added.

LIMITS ON THE EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN BIBLICAL HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY HISTORY Functional equivalence must not be permitted to override the historical particularity of the Bible. There is a sense in which any text is historically conditioned, of course, in that it was written in a certain language at a certain time by a certain individual (whether or not that individual’s identity is known). But the accurate understanding (and therefore accurate translation) of some literary forms depends rather more acutely on recognizing their historical particularity than is the case for some other literary forms. Even in the case of proverbs and aphorisms, which are among the most timeless of literary genres, some will prove more easily translatable than others. “Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him” (Prov 26:12) is likely to be coherent in most languages; “better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelsome wife” (Prov 25:24) presupposes flat roofs frequented by humans, not snow-shedding sloped roofs never visited except to replace a gutter or a satellite dish. Still, it does not take a huge amount of explanation to render coherent the flat roof, whether to a mud-hut dweller in an equatorial jungle or to a high-rise apartment dweller in an urban jungle, and the preservation of the form, though not in this instance theologically urgent, has the advantage of reminding the reader that all of these things took place in a foreign land, a specific culture, and an historical time and place. The challenges become more difficult when we leave aphorism for narrative. The problems of equivalence can be grouped under the headings (1) ecology, (2) material culture, (3) social culture, (4) religious culture, and (5) linguistic culture.95 The problems are highly diverse, and there is no simple way to categorize

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the possible solutions. An Eskimo tribe reads a Bible that speaks of desert and lions; a Mexican tribe in Yucatan has never experienced the four seasons typical of temperate zones (cf. Mark 13:28). If we follow TEV’s “police” or NEB’s “constable” in Matthew 5:25, are we not unwittingly fostering, for many Westerners, images of a gun-toting officer in a squad car or of an English bobby? Perhaps these cases do not matter; perhaps “police” is acceptable. But many cases have stings in the tail. If, for instance, we replace “recline at food” or “recline at table” with “sit down to eat,” we are going to have a tough job imagining how John managed to get his head on Jesus’ breast—Leonardo da Vinci notwithstanding. Preservation of descriptions of what is to us an alien custom, reclining at tables, makes it possible to understand a later action, in this case John placing his head on Jesus’ breast. I am not now dealing with such obvious and domesticating distortions as “this is the essence of all true religion” (Matt 7:12 PHILLIPS) for “this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (NIV), or “then a diabolical plan came into the mind of Judas” (Luke 22:3 PHILLIPS) for “Then Satan entered Judas” (NIV). Rather, what is of interest at this juncture is that God has revealed himself to people in timespace history—to particular men and women, spatially and temporally and linguistically located. If we are not very cautious about the way we treat the historical particulars, we may introduce such substantive anachronisms that the story becomes intrinsically unbelievable—the more so as the receptor people grow in understanding and historical awareness. And certainly we lose the enormous theological implications of the truth that, according to Scripture, the personal-transcendent God has disclosed himself in real history. There are ways of overcoming the obscurity intrinsic in references to customs and experiences unknown on receptor soil. Footnotes may be part of the answer (see discussion below); teachers are certainly part of it. But always we must at least ask how much we are losing when we remove too many indicators of historical and cultural “distance.” How such problems are resolved may depend to some extent on the literary stage of development of the receptor group, but even if the group is coming across the printed page for the first time and enjoys virtually no comprehension of cultures other than their own, it must be remembered that this receptor group will likely use this new translation of the Bible for decades to come, maybe for a century or two. During all of that time, an increasing number of this receptor people will be exposed to new cultures and education. How well will the Bible translation serve them then? Christianity is a religion whose roots are deeply embedded in the particularities of history, and our translations must not obscure that fact.

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LIMITS ON THE DISTORTION (WITTING OR UNWITTING) OF SALVATION HISTORY An extension of the third point brings us to a fresh observation. Functional equivalence must not be permitted to mask the development of and internal relations within salvation history. Suppose, for instance, that a tribe has a long tradition of sacrificing pigs but has never so much as heard of sheep. Is it in that case justifiable to render John 1:29, “Look, the swine of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”? I would argue strongly for the negative, not only because of the importance of historical particularity, the importance of which was defended in the previous point, but because of the plethora of rich allusions preserved in Scripture across the sweep of salvation history. In what sense could it be said that Jesus “fulfills” the Old Testament sacrificial system if that system typically sacrificed lambs at Passover, all the while proclaiming that pigs are ceremonially unclean, whereas Jesus is portrayed in John 1:29 as a swine? How then will John 1:29 relate to Isaiah 52:13–53:12, the fourth servant song, or to images of the warrior lamb in the Apocalypse (e.g., Rev 5:6)? Shall we change all such references to pigs (“We all, like swine, have gone astray . . .”)? And if so, do we then make the biblical “pig references” clean, and designate some other animal unclean? No; it is surely simpler and more faithful to preserve “lamb” in the first instance. If this involves inventing a new word in a receptor language whose users have never heard of “sheep,” so be it. A brief note could explain that the word refers to an animal frequently sacrificed by the people of the Bible, along with a succinct description of its relevant characteristics. There is a second way in which appeal to functional equivalence must not be permitted to mask the development and internal relations of salvation history. We have witnessed a negative example in Charles Kraft’s appeal to polygamy under the old covenant. What Kraft never struggles with is the nature of the continuity/discontinuity pattern when moving from the old covenant to the new. One can no more make legitimate appeal to the Old Testament to support polygamy among Christian leaders in Africa than one can appeal to the Old Testament to defend continued Christian maintenance of all dietary laws. The fact that Christians disagree over certain elements of the continuity/discontinuity pattern is no justification for the failure to wrestle with the issue when dealing with something as sensitive in parts of Africa as is polygamy. In any case, my point is more general: One cannot hide behind “functional equivalence” to justify the obliteration of salvation-historical distinctions that are fundamental to the most elementary understanding of the Bible as a cohesive document.

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LIMITS ON THE PURSUIT OF COMPREHENSIBILITY One of the entirely salutary emphases of functional equivalence is its passion to make the Bible as comprehensible in translation as possible. But sometimes that entirely worthy goal can lose sight of the fact that some passages in the Bible are obscure. One recalls the shrewd remark of Bishop Stephen Neill: “I remember once exploding angrily in the Tamil Bible translation committee, when we had so smoothed out the complex passage Galatians 2:1–10 as to conceal completely the tensions and confusions which underlie the apostle’s twisted grammar. This we had no right to do.”96 In other words, faithfulness to the text should compel us to try to avoid making the translation a great deal easier to understand (in the receptor language) than the original is to readers of the source language.

LIMITS ON THE AUTHORITY OF STYLISTS AND OTHER RECEPTOR-LANGUAGE SPECIALISTS In the light of the argument so far, I am inclined, somewhat hesitantly, to call into question the judgment of Eugene Nida and others, who argue that good exegetes and grammarians make poor translators.97 Increasingly, they argue that translation projects should begin with stylists who enjoy some marginal knowledge of Greek and Hebrew but who are thoroughly competent in the receptor language, and then permit the specialists their say only at the cleaning-up stage. Quite clearly, the gifts and training of the stylists, or, more broadly, of the receptor-language specialists, are vital. But I wonder if grammarians and exegetes are dismissed too rapidly. Most field translators for such organizations as Wycliffe Bible Translators (or SIL) and the American Bible Society have one theological degree, perhaps two—i.e., two or three years (i.e., four to six semester courses) of Greek and perhaps half that of Hebrew (or no Hebrew at all). Their problem, it may be, is not that they have too much Greek to be good translators, but too little. I would go further and suggest that even many teachers of Greek and Hebrew in colleges, seminaries, and universities do not enjoy much facility in the language they are teaching. These are precisely the kinds of people who are least likely to be sensitive to the demands of functional equivalence. How often, for example, have I taken second-year Greek students aside and explained at length how rarely a Greek participle should be rendered by an English participle, how many of the Greek connectives must find no formal equivalent in a specific English word but survive in the flow of the English sentence, and so forth. And I have learned that it is my best students in advanced exegesis and advanced grammar courses who learn such flexibility most thoroughly. To

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be good translators, they would benefit from further study in linguistics, sociolinguistics, and literary style; but at a guess, advanced competence in the source languages will not prove a hindrance but a strength in most cases, provided the teacher is aware of the linguistic complexities and subtleties that surround translation. It is the student of Greek and Hebrew who has a mechanical view of language who will have most difficulty grasping these elementary points and who in the name of fidelity will defend more “direct” translations, even when the result is largely incomprehensible to the target readers and hearers. One of the reasons I have suggested this alternative—that front-rank Bible translators need a good deal more training in Greek and Hebrew, not less—is to combat the drift in many academic circles toward less training in the source languages and toward so great a flexibility in translation that, as we have seen, “communication” becomes an ideal abstracted from the message to be communicated. New voices loudly insist there is an impregnable wedge between the meaning of the source and the meaning of the receptor. To provide at least some safeguards, we must encourage translators to pursue studies not only in linguistics and style but also in the languages, history, culture, symbolism, genre, and theology of the biblical documents. Only then is it possible to “fuse horizons” with high reliability and counteract the growing tide of relativism and arbitrariness.

LIMITS ON OUR EXPECTATIONS OF WHAT THE BIBLE BY ITSELF WILL USUALLY ACHIEVE This way of making the point must not be misunderstood. It is certainly not a demand that limits be placed on the Bible’s truthfulness, authority, and so forth. We have all heard stories of people who have simply read the Bible and been wonderfully converted. I know of one fascinating conversion brought about when the person in question, a Muslim student studying in the West, stole a Gideon Bible from a hotel nightstand, read it through, and was converted. In the hands of God, the Bible is a powerful book. Yet sometimes translators give the impression that doing their job right is all that is needed. Although functional equivalence is an important—indeed, essential—component of good translation, we should tone down our claims for what it can achieve. Precisely because functional equivalence is so often described in terms of equivalent response, we are in danger of giving the impression that, provided we get our translations right, we can practically guarantee a massive turning to Christ, revisiting Acts 2, perhaps (even if no one is so gauche as to put it that way). But this means we have no place for an Ethiopian eunuch who needed an explanation of a grammatically clear text (Acts 8:26–40), no place for

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the hardness of the human heart (1 Cor 2:14), no place for the work of the Holy Spirit, no reflection on the diversity of worldviews that various readers bring to the text and therefore the diversity of faithful responses needed to confront these worldviews (compare the sermons of Acts 13 and Acts 17).98 The Scriptures themselves encourage us to multiply the number of evangelists, pastor/teachers, and other workers, thereby discouraging the notion that the entire task depends exclusively on the quality of the Bible translation used. This is not to justify obscure translations on the basis of, say, total depravity: If people do not understand the Word of God, it is said, it is not because we retain the Elizabethan English of the KJV, but because their hearts are hard. The element of truth in the claim is that, even with the most contemporary and most readable translations, conversion is finally a function of the work of the Spirit. Nevertheless, the Spirit uses means, and appeal to the work of the Spirit does not justify our preference for traditional formulae and archaic language if we claim to be witnesses to this generation and the next generation. But having again established these checks and balances, in our defense of functional equivalence we should, especially at the popular level, curb our exuberance, lest we jeopardize our credibility by the extravagance of our claims. The proper use of functional-equivalence translations decreases the likelihood of misunderstanding arising from poor translation, but it is not a universal spiritual panacea.

LIMITS ON THE USE OF STUDY NOTES At several points in this essay I have suggested that it is better in many cases to preserve the historical distance of the original text and provide an explanatory note than to make the “translation” so contemporary that the historical particularity is lost. This raises the question of the place of study notes and study Bibles. For there are converse dangers. It is possible to deploy so many “direct” translations that a great number of notes are required to make the text understandable to those with a good working knowledge of the receptor language but with no knowledge whatsosever of the source language. Eugene Nida and Charles Taber offer several wise observations in this regard, the best of which, perhaps, is their judgment that “it is best at least to make sense in the text and put the scholarly caution in the margin, rather than to make nonsense in the text and offer the excuse in the margin.”99 But my purpose here is to offer a further caution. Because I do not think that, by and large, functional equivalence should override the distancing that stems both from historical particularism and from the history of redemption (however much it may demand transformed linguistic structures), I favor a

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fairly liberal use of notes explaining cultural, religious, ecological, and linguistic points, especially in Bibles designed for groups made up largely of first readers who thus have very little knowledge of the biblical world. But great pains should be taken to make such notes as theologically neutral and objective as possible. Theological notes, hortatory comments, notes explaining the theological flow, homiletical hints—in my view all such things should be relegated to separate books. I recognize that I am out of step with current publishing practices when I write this. The impetus for the judgment is both theoretical and experiential. At the theoretical level, surely it is desirable to avoid giving the impression that the authority of the notes has the authority of Scripture itself—a confusion easy to fall into when both are printed on the same page. Experientially, I learned some lessons from my boyhood in Quebec. At the time, if Roman Catholics read the Bible at all, they had to read a Bible approved by the Roman Catholic Church, one with approved notes (such as the Léger version of the New Testament). I witnessed firsthand how such notes could reinforce the theological biases of people such that it was hard for readers to listen to what the text was actually saying. Even when theoretical allowance is made for the distinction between text and note, the constant rereading of both on the same page blurs this distinction and shapes the theological convictions of many readers. What applies to the Léger version applies, mutatis mutandis, to the New Scofield Reference Bible, the Ryrie Study Bible, and a dozen others.100 A few years ago I was asked to assume a major role in producing a new study Bible. Consistency demanded that I decline. It is better, I think, to reserve such study helps and comments (which are, in fact, sorely needed) to separate publications. It would be good to avoid transmitting our mistakes in this area to places where Bibles are appearing in new languages for the first time. Equally, it would be salutary to remember that the God of the Bible ordained that there be evangelists and teachers in the church. Translation of the Scriptures is not the only thing needed for adequate communication of the gospel. God has equally mandated the training and deployment of evangelists and pastor/teachers. Failure to account for this aspect of our task may unwittingly encourage a “translation” that is to some degree a perceived replacement of human agents or, worse, a mere crib for those with little more than a smattering of the original languages. Having said this, however, a fairly liberal use of notes that are as theologically neutral as possible—notes that focus on historical, linguistic, and cultural matters—may not only prove to be a good thing but may also remove some of the pressure to de-historicize biblical texts.

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In short, there are limits to be imposed on any Pollyannaish enthusiasm for unconstrained functional equivalence—just as there are limits to be imposed on the dour warnings of linguistic conservatives. NOTES 1. D. A. Carson, “The Limits of Dynamic Equivalence in Bible Translation,” Evangelical Review of Theology 9 (1985): 200–213. 2. See, for example, Notes on Translation 121 (October 1987): 1–15. 3. Some further refinements along the same line found their place in my essay celebrating the 175th anniversary of the American Bible Society: “New Bible Translations: An Assessment and Prospect,” in The Bible in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Howard Clark Kee (New York: American Bible Society, 1993), 37–67. 4. Eugene A. Nida and Charles R. Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation (Leiden: Brill, 1974). 5. Jan de Waard and Eugene A. Nida, From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating (Nashville: Nelson, 1986). 6. See, for example, Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society, 2d ed. (London: Penguin, 1983); Johannes P. Louw, ed., Sociolinguistics and Communication, UBS Monograph Series 1 (London: United Bible Societies, 1986). For easy access to the subject, see M. Paul Lewis, “Of Sociolinguistics, Bible Translation, and Dancing,” Notes on Translation 15, no. 2 (2001): 55–61. 7. See especially Ernst-August Gutt, Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 8. See, among other things, Robert-Alain de Beaugrande and Wolfgang D